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The Dropa Stones
The story of the Dropa begins in the year is 1938. The mountains are the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains on the border that divides China and Tibet. An archaeological expedition, led by Chi Pu Tei, has trudged into the barely accessible mountain range, and has happened upon some caves that had obviously been occupied by a primitive people long ago. On the walls were carved pictograms of the heavens: the sun, the moon, the stars, and the Earth with lines of dots connecting them. Then the team made the most incredible discovery of all. Half-buried in the dirt floor of the cave was an odd stone disk, obviously fashioned by the hand of an intelligent creature. The disk was approximately nine inches in diameter and three-quarters of an inch thick. In the exact centre was a perfectly round, 3/4" hole, and etched in its face was a fine groove spiraling out from the centre to the rim, making the disk look for all the world like some kind of primitive phonograph record. This one plate, dated to be between 10,000 and 12,000 years old, but the wonder was multiplied manifold. In all, 716 such plates were found. And each held an incredible secret. The groove, upon further inspection, was not a groove at all, but a continuous line of strange carved hieroglyphics - writing!

Dr. Tsum Um Nui , in 1962, painstakingly transcribed the characters from the disk to paper. The writing was so small he had to use a magnifying glass to see it clearly. But the stones were old - perhaps 12,000 years old, it was estimated - and much of the hieroglyphics were difficult to make out or had been worn away by time and the elements. As he worked, many questions nagged the professor. How did these primitive people fashion these precise stones? How did they manage the almost microscopic writing? Who were they and what was the purpose of these hundreds of stones? Once the characters were transcribed, Dr. Tsum Um Nui began the arduous task of trying to decode its message. Eventually, he began to make progress. A word emerged. Then another. A phrase became understandable, then an entire sentence. He had broken the code. He discerned that the messages on the stones were written by a people who called themselves the Dropa. But what they were saying to him 12,000 years later made no sense. What the Dropa had written must have been one of their cultural myths, or was part of some prehistoric religious ceremony. Or was it? When he had completed the translation the professor wrote up a paper on his findings and presented it to the university for publication. Their reaction was swift and emphatic: the paper would not be published. The Academy of Prehistory expressly forbade him to publish or even speak of his findings. The world, the academy decided, should not know about the Dropa and their fateful journey to Earth. The Dropa disks tell the story of a space probe from a distant planet that crash-landed in the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains of the Himalayas. The occupants of the spacecraft - the Dropa - found refuge in the caves of the mountains. The stones go on to say how the Dropa were unable to repair their disabled spacecraft and could not return to their home planet, and so were stranded on Earth. If that's true, have their descendents survived?

www.geocities.com/tasosmit2001/alien.htm

Critics have largely rejected the above claims, arguing they are a combination of hoax and urban legend. For example, writer David Richie notes that the Dropa tales intrigued Gordon Chreighton, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society and Royal Geographical Society. Upon investigation, Chreighton judged the sensationalistic Dropa-Extraterrestrial allegations to be "groundless," and detailed his findings in an article for Flying Saucer Review.

No traceable, credible evidence for this theory exists, or can be proven to have existed in the past. Proponents of the Dropa-stones story claim that this is the result of social disruption caused by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and of a conspiratorial coverup by Chinese authorities. However this story goes well beyond China. Its opponents claim it is long proven to be a forgery by Erich von Däniken.

Below is a detailed rebuttal of most sensationalistic Extraterrestrial/Dropa claims:

* 1. The discovery. There are no mentions of 'Tsum Um Nui' anywhere; as he is supposed to have fled China and died in Japan in the 1960s this cannot be negated by Cultural Revolution - Communist coverup theory. Also, there is no mention of the 1938 archaeological expedition to the Bayan Kara Ula range. No "Peking Academy of Pre-History" ever existed.

* 2. Early Sources. The earliest mention of the story is in Erich von Däniken's infamous 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods. The book has been widely criticised as unreliable; in fact, the vast majority of names and sources appearing in the book cannot be corroborated, and no existence of the following Soviet or Chinese scholars can be found anywhere outside this story: Chu Pu Tei, Tsum Um Nui, Ernst Wegener, Vyatcheslav Saitzev, and Sergei Lolladoff. Most tellingly, Däniken gives his main source for the story as a Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev; however Kazantsev himself disagrees with Däniken's account and says that it was Däniken who told him the story, not the other way around.

* 3. Later Sources. The 1978 book Sungods in Exile "edited" by David Agamon, appeared to lend support to the story of the Dropa, but Agamon admitted in the magazine Fortean Times in 1988 that the book was fiction and that its alleged author, a British researcher named Dr. Karyl Robin-Evans, was imaginary. Some websites claim to show a photo of Dr Robin-Evans with the Dalai Lama. A frail, old man assisted by the current Dalai Lama, the photograph is quite recent and can not be Dr Robin-Evans -- he died in 1978, according to Hartwig Hausdorf.

* 4. Translation. There is absolutely no precedent for an unknown language being successfully deciphered. All lost ancient languages have been rediscovered only because they survived in forms familiar to scientists. Even in such cases, deciphering and understanding these older language forms and their scripts has usually taken decades for multiple teams of highly competent linguists, and their findings are constantly being debated and updated. Many ancient scripts (notably Linear A from the island of Crete and Rongorongo from Easter Island), have defied deciphering precisely because they cannot be linked to any known language. Given these facts, there would be even greater difficulties in translating a truly extraterrestrial language. It is therefore highly unlikely that a single Chinese scholar with no reported background in linguistics could single-handedly decipher an alien script or language in his spare time.

* 5. The Disks. All that exists of the supposed alien disks are several wide-angle photographs. The disks photographed, firstly, do not match the described "12-inch disks"; the disks photographed are very large. Secondly, the photos show none of the supposed deep grooves. Finally, absolutely no photos, descriptions, analyses or any other evidence of the actual 'alien script' appear anywhere at all.

* 6. The Evidence. The disks were supposed to be stored in several museums in China. None of these museums have any traces of these disks, nor can any be found of the ones supposedly sent to USSR for analysis.

* 7. The Dropa Tribe. While reported to be a tribe of feeble dwarfs, in actuality the Dropas are nomadic herders who inhabit most of the northern Tibetan Plateau. The Ham are also inhabitants of Tibet, and traditionally have supplied Tibet's warriors: many of the 13th Dalai Lama's bodyguards during his escape from the Chinese invasion were Ham Tibetans. The word "Dropa", according to Chrieghton, describes the nomadic residents of Tibetan highlands, and can be roughly translated as "solitude" or "isolated". Furthermore, Chreighton described the Dropa as not resembling "troglodytes", or as stunted; on the contrary, they tend to be rather large and sturdy, befitting their occupation as herders. (Richie, 95-96)

The number of stars in the universe.
So the total number of stars in the universe is roughly 100 billion x 100 billion.
That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, 10 thousand, billion, billion. Properly known as 10 sextillion. And that's a very conservative estimate.

We have found life in some of the most inhospitable and unlikely locations here on Earth, and it will be no different in the rest of the universe.

This is what always gets me about people quoting probabilities to refute the possibility of certain events being random.

They think that since the number is so astronomically large that it excludes the possibility of occurrence. - obliq

But regardless of how astronomically improbable the situation may be, there is still that 1 chance the occurrence might happen - obliq

There is no voodoo to DNA. It is just as universal as water is. If we can find DNA here on Earth, we can find it out there. We have found life in some of the most inhospitable and unlikely locations here on Earth, and it will be no different in the rest of the universe.

This is one of the reasons that underwater volcanoes are a source of great interest insofar as extraterrestrial life is concerned because it pushes back the boundaries of where life may be formed in a solar system to anywhere that water can be liquidized due to heat and pressure, not just due to proximity to the star... so for instance, undersea vents on forzen moons or worlds like the moons of Jupiter could potentially have life.
This indeed raises the bar.

As far as incomprehensibly high numbers goes, well this says more about the person than the calculation I should say

I once again reiterate the comfort with which the scientist is able to live with uncertainty in the face of not knowing the absolute source of all knowledge while blithely continuing to learn about his universe.

It is OK not to know the ultimate source. Just let go of that big comfy blanket of certainty and give it a push...because it's really not helping you that much anyway...and frankly the rest of us are laughing at you behind our hands because your certainty could stand a good wash, tunble dry and some nice smelling fabric softener.

Pushes back the boundaries? Like we can put boundaries to life! We don't control life. We are just observers of it.