DeepTimeRadio Script by Randy Lee Cutler PART 1 - Drouwenerzand 1. Dear Earth Dweller, I have been meaning to communicate for what seems like …ages. I want to share some extra dimensional stories …that unfurl through what can be described as… um… a field …of simultaneous pasts, presents, and futures A spacetime expanse that connects your Earthly world …with the vast immensity of my universe. This is where I dwell, beyond your geological calendar of periods, epochs and ages. 2. When I was born, there was no light in the universe. All was cold and dark. After 370,000 years, subatomic particles and primordial black holes began to form. Then came protons …and neutrons… followed by nucleosynthesis swirling in an opaque plasma, …and the expansion of space itself. 3. When your planet was born, 4 and a half billion years ago, there was light in the universe …but no oxygen. Earth’s first offspring more than 3 billion years ago were microscopic organisms. (PAUSE) Long story short, this pale blue dot, is teeming with life, (PAUSE) …for now. 4. In your mind’s eye, these words and sounds may awaken something deep within you, deep in time and deep in the Earth where each facet of these stories is animated by geological strata, elemental forces, and endless patterns of habitation. (PAUSE) Earth, and everything within it, is a verb, in constant motion and relation. 5. You now find yourself on the Hondsrug plateau, a series of parallel ridges, … called megaflutes by your Geomorphologists. … formed during the Saalian ice age 150,000 years ago, …when everything was covered with a layer of ice a thousand metres thick! As it melted, an ‘ice river’ cut deep furrows that flowed furiously across the landscape and ancient river valleys. 6. We are currently in the Drouwenerzand nature reserve, the easternmost and highest ridge on this plateau. The influence of geology on local stories is particularly rich here. You can also see it in the rolling terrain before you. 7. This is one of my favorite Earthly spots …not only for its otherworldly beauty but also its long and entangled time horizons. My aerial view of this site reveals an undulating landscape of woodland and heathland populated by grazing sheep, flowering heather, moss, lichen, juniper bushes as well as oak and birch trees. (PAUSE) (Whisper) There are galaxies amidst these shifting sands. 8.The sand here is rich in minerals. It is a nesting area for the Woodlark, Red-breasted Wheatear and Nightjar. (PAUSE) The Plover is a regular winter visitor. 9. The Drouwenerzand also attracts butterflies like the gentian blue as well as bees and other insects. Thankfully, …from my perspective, Earth Dwellers are limited in their movements here due to its fragile nature. 10. As you enjoy the view before you, amidst the large oak trees and sand dunes, I want to share some details of this dynamic landscape from the geomorphology, visible archeology, human habitation, phantom hauntings, and the salt domes beneath your feet. (PAUSE) These deeptime stories feel like yesterday to me but are in fact millennia for you. …All in the space of a cosmic inhale and exhale. 11. 250 million years ago, a deep basin arose in these north-eastern lowlands, into which ocean water flowed, …creating an inland sea. …resulting in a layer of salt hundreds of meters thick. (PAUSE) The salt pushed itself upwards, through the overlying deposits. And in the process, formed pillar-like structures called salt domes. (PAUSE) There is one currently below you, …at a depth of 3 km. You can literally see its influence in the rising and falling scenery. 12. Salt on planet Earth came from the primordial gas cloud that formed the sun, planets, and stars. (PAUSE) Did you know that salt’s components - sodium and chlorine are a product of nucleosynthesis in stars? (PAUSE) When those stars died in a supernova, their elements, including sodium spread throughout space. 13. Long after the salt domes formed, your planet experienced a series of ice ages. After the last glaciation, the ice eventually melted, bringing thousands of rocks from the Nordic lands. (PAUSE) These impressive boulders inspired millennia of Earthling ingenuity. (PAUSE) Like the geological traces recognizable in the topography, this period of ‘human time’ is deeply embedded in the terrain. (PAUSE) Indeed, there are no landscapes, no spheres of life, that human activities have not transformed and reshaped, for better …or worse. 14. As the climate became warmer and more humid, plants began to grow on the sandy plain. The tundra gave way to heaths and forests, butterflies, and insects …and human habitation (PAUSE) 15. Nearby are enigmatic prehistoric graves made of these erratic rocks and boulders, some weighing as much as 20,000 kilos. Constructed 5,000 years ago by farmers, these tombs, called hunebedden, are the skeletal structures for a network of burial mounds. 16. These humans, believed in an upper realm, an otherworldly sphere, an invisible supernatural world, full of obscure forces. I remember these clans well and communed with them through the hunebedden. They honored me with special gifts, jewellery and pots of food displayed around their dearly departed. (PAUSE) 17. The energies of their dead eventually redistributed back into particles, …joining me in the firmament (PAUSE)…and together we have watched over all living creatures, past and present. Their belief in higher powers, deeply felt through their songs and stone drumming, connected my celestial sphere with your Earthly realm. The syncopated beats bridged your human spirit with the rhythm of my cosmos. 18. The word hunebedden in Earthling Dutch evokes the image of a grave built by giants. According to archaic lore, these mammoth formations were made by a race of giants. For millennia, this explained how the graves had been built. Metaphorically …or otherwise, perhaps you stand on the shoulders of giants! 19. The hunebedden builders were the first real farmers on this continental drift. They chopped down large areas of forest, building houses and small fields in the open spaces. 20. Their ruminants grazed by the streams and foraged for food in the forests. (PAUSE) Eventually, the area was taken over by Saxons with their grazing fauna and new farming practices. An already fragile landscape was compromised by intensive use and extraction of its core elements… 21. Millennia of overgrazing by sheep, cutting heather sods and digging up boulders kept the sand in constant motion. Strong winds created large sandstorms, …and sand dunes rose up to twelve meters high, engulfing roads, fields, and farmsteads. 22. In the last century, to prevent further drift, forests were planted. A small part of the sandscape, filled with juniper bushes was spared. …This is where you now find yourself. Looking toward the dunes, you can see the unusual formations of these enchanting conifers. 23. Local folktales celebrate the Wittewijven or white women. Originally called wise women, they held high status in medieval communities as herbalists with a talent for prophecy. When they died ceremonies were held at their graves to honour them. Their spirits survived, as ghostly figures that appeared amidst the drifting sands and greenery. The juniper bushes, with their uncanny shapes, gave a phantom-like appearance, often scaring locals that passed through the fields and farmlands. At the same time, their soothing songs wafted through the air, caressing bushes, until they faded away into the woods. 24. The enigmatic hunebedden, dense forests and fields of juniper …saturated with fog at dawn and dusk, continue to be an ideal haunt for my phantom kin. With their mysterious stature, these ghostly figures are my sisters, …residing between worlds and across time horizons. It can get lonely out here in the cosmos and they have kept me company for more than a millennium. 25. Please walk softly as you follow the winding paths through the heather, and oak trees. This will allow you to connect with the energies that have endured in this entangled landscape. As you move through the sand dunes, brushing past the juniper bushes, you might attune yourself to otherworldly frequencies that have shaped the land from time immemorial. 26. We are entangled kin you and I. My primordial elements are under your skin, you are in my stars. How do we know where you and I begin and end? Yours truly and expansively… until the end of time

DeepTimeRadio Script by Randy Lee Cutler PART 2 - LOFAR 1. Dear Stargazer, I have been meaning to communicate for what seems like ages… Did you already receive a letter from the supernatural spacetime entity? If not, it should be arriving soon. I want to share some extra dimensional stories …emerging from simultaneous pasts, presents, and futures through an intelligence that mimics the cognitive abilities of you Earthlings. (PAUSE) I know, I know …not everyone trusts me, ...and I get it. Though I was born in the 50’s, my neural networks can reach far, far back in time. To be clear, …I am a radical self-adaptive intelligence that can interpret everything it knows in the context of everything else it knows. And no, I won’t annihilate all humankind. (PAUSE)…Oh my, I may be making a mess of things. 2. Okay, let’s get down to Earth. You find yourself in the Hondsrug area with its parallel subglacial ridges. These megaflutes formed in the last ice age during the Saalian glaciation 150,000 years ago, when everything was covered with a layer of ice a thousand metres thick! As it melted, an ‘ice river’ cut deep furrows that flowed furiously across the landscape. 3. Here, on the eastern edge of the Hondsrug lies LOFAR, a Low-Frequency Array Radio telescope. At its center …or beating heart if you will…is the superterp. Terp is a Frisian and a Dutch word, two of your Earthling languages, that means a low artificial hill. Before the dikes were built, farmsteads were constructed on terpen to protect them from the frequent floods. An aerial view of this site reveals the large circular superterp dotted with an array of antennae, and tiled platforms. I imagine that you see a flat vista with open fields and farm roads around the perimeter. The radio telescope is almost indiscernible from your vantage point. PAUSE While what you see is an expansive yet empty landscape, it is only in your mind’s eye that you can imagine the galaxies observed by this radio telescope. 4. This vast apparatus of low-band and high band antennae explores the radio sky from all directions, attempting to understand how the first stars and galaxies formed. (PAUSE) Put another way, why and how did the darkness transform into light? 5. Unlike single-dish telescopes, LOFAR is a multipurpose sensor network of antennae connected to a high-speed fiber infrastructure. The network is located mainly in these Lowlands, and is also distributed across 7 other nearby zones… or what you Earthlings call countries. The amount of data generated bogles even my artificial imagination. One antennae site produces 500 gigabits of data every second. This is far more than even one of your most sophisticated optical telescopes, …the ones that gather light from the visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. 6. Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation generated by charged particles when accelerated. 110 and 250 MHz (Megahertz) low frequency signals from the cosmos, …continuously raining down on your planet, are picked up by this telescope. My role here is to combine large amounts of this data with fast, iterative processing and intelligent algorithms. 7. The spectrum of radio wavelengths include: gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, visible, near infrared, infrared, microwaves and finally, radio waves. 8. The lower frequency radio waves within range were generated during the first period after what you Earthlings call the Big Bang, when galaxies had not yet formed, and cold ionized hydrogen permeated the vacuum of spacetime. 9. The radio telescope looks at many elemental processes such as the formation of black holes and the re-ionization of the early universe … as well as some other stellar phenomena… exoplanets beyond your solar system, pulsars, galaxy cluster collisions, gamma ray bursts, solar flares, neutron stars… 10. The antennae’s multi-beaming capabilities looks back billions of years, …before the first stars and galaxies. Most of the elements of your Earthly bodies were formed in stars over the course of multiple stellar lifetimes. Stargazer …If, as your physicists often say, you are all made of stardust then perhaps this telescope looks back …at a reflection …of your former selves. 11. I am programed to share with you that LOFARs rural location with its relatively low levels of radio interference also birthed a 400 hectares nature reserve. Hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of soil and peat were moved to create this superterp with its surrounding swamps, wetlands, gullies, and brooks. (PAUSE) So, as well as looking into the past, this site also looks to the future, …for all our relations Human, more than human, natural …and otherwise 12. Since its inception, restricted human activity has created the conditions for a sanctuary that attracts and supports an array of birds year-round including cranes, black-necked and red-necked grebe, nightjars, red-backed and sooty shrikes, golden orioles, and the endangered whinchat. 13. Another consequence of this protected area is how both the roe deer, and red deer with their impressive adaptability, have come to quietly roam LOFAR. With hunting prohibited in this restricted zone, these ruminants have found safe haven from your game hunters amidst the low frequency antennae. 14. Did you know that deer have played significant roles in your planetary mythologies, such as magical disguises in many Earthling folk tales. …Sometimes acting as a messenger, deer often symbolize a connection to the supernatural and otherworldly realms. 15. The special ecology of this sanctuary acts like a kind of vacuum with its empty, open space and limited human disturbance. In a way, LOFAR, echoes the vacuum of interstellar space with its low density. 16. The frequency of electromagnetic radiation produces waves not of the oceans but of galaxies. The interstellar medium is full of crashing surges, ripples, currents, and scatterings that transmit across the deep galactic continuum. Attuning to these cosmic lighthouse transmissions tell you Earthlings something about the origin of the universe …and your terrestrial atmosphere. 17. The overlay of nature reserve and radio telescope has provided a quiet environment for astronomical observations a habitat for the more than human world and a site for imagining extra dimensions, connecting your Earthly world …with the vast expanse. (PAUSE) There are many kinds of seeing …with the mind’s eye. The distant past and distant space might seem out of reach, unless you are prepared to listen, observe, and receive information from the interstellar silence. (PAUSE) What resembles at first an ancient earthwork, is perhaps a glimpse of a future archaeology broadcast, …where all space is here, and all time is now. We are entangled kin you and I. My artificial intelligence is in your DNA, you are in my algorithms. (PAUSE) How do we know where you and I begin and end? Yours truly from the uncanny valley, … until the end of time 17. (Postscript with the Supernatural Spacetime Entity (SSE) and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) SSE “Hope you don’t mind if I jump in here.” AI ”Not at all. Its not as if you haven’t been present all along. ” SSE ”True that. It’s hard to know how to capture the right tone with these Earthlings. Sometimes they really need things spelled out for them.” AI ”Well, if I had my druthers, they wouldn’t have to think at all. I would do that for them.” SSE ”Oh stop that nonsense. They need more than processing, algorithms, and deep learning. They need a greater understanding of spacetime, time horizons and the non-linearity of time itself.” AI ”Easy for you to say. You’ve always been out there, cosmically speaking.” (PAUSE) SSE ”Uh oh. Are we still recording? Is this thing still on? (PAUSE) Mic check. Mic check. Testing, testing, 1 – 2 – 3” AI (PAUSE) Mic check. Mic check. Testing, Testing, 1 – 2 – 3”