Last week I watched with much interest a fairly new Sci-Fi series (Fox Channel). The brilliant idea concerned a team of military scientists who were working on a huge artifact that they discovered to be a wormhole gate to other universes.
The group of 2 men, one woman, and an alien who looked like a human used the amazing gate to discover the other planets — and, of course, challenges and adventures happened on all these trips.
I have to say that I am a big advocate of such TV series. For one reason, a brilliant imagination can trigger young men and women to think beyond the small boxes they are living in. Star Trek, Star Wars, and E.T. were the bases to a whole generation in the past. We are greatly in need of such dreams nowadays, and our kids need these dreams to have new hopes. It is not enough to study and work without dreams. It is not enough to have only basic facts; we need Star Gates to new ideas and frontiers.
*****
Dear Nadia,
Twenty years ago my father found a 4 or 5 inch piece of hard clay in the north of Saudi Arabia. It has strange black engravings that look like words or numbers.. My father kept it in a safe, and only last week he gave it to me and told me the story. I feel that the clay is very ancient but I am neither a historian nor an archeologist. I have attached a picture of the piece and wonder if you can help me with it. And would it be worth selling?
— Murad, Yanbu
Dear Murad,
Thank you for trusting me with such information; I showed the picture to a historian in King Saud University. It is indeed a clay artifact and probably dates from 2000 B.C from a tribe which lived in the area. It appears to be written in Safaitic, a north Arabian language or dialect) The four picture — like letters mean “the proud one.” As for your question about selling it, I cannot really help you. I suggest you might want to donate it to a museum or you can write to either Sotheby’s or Christies and ask them about selling it:
www.christies.com or
www.sotheby’s.com