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Phone ET: SETI's director wants to up search for extra-terrestrials

If contact with extraterrestrial life is made through radio telescopes, a decipherment process may have to take place to understand the message.

Are we alone in the Universe? Could there be other intelligent civilizations out there? Discovering life beyond Earth is considered one of the Holy Grails of science, however after a half century of listening to the cosmos, all that has been heard is static and silence.

But this hasn’t dampened enthusiasm among astronomers who are now actively considering taking a more pro-active approach in contacting distant intelligent civilizations.

Known as active SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence), the new approach would have us use the world’s largest radio telescopes, like the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to repeatedly broadcast transmissions to hundreds of neighbouring stars that have been identified as having habitable planets.

Some scientists believe that after so many decades of just listening, it is now time to send out virtual greetings to see if we get a response.

Space travel itself holds no hope in the near future since distances between the stars are so vast and even the most advanced space propulsion technologies like fusion rockets or matter-antimatter engines are decades, if not centuries away, from becoming reality. Therefore if we want to cast a wide net and conduct a meaningful search, radio astronomy is currently our best hope for a discovery.

And while all this talk of beaming out greetings into the Universe is exciting, this would not be our first efforts to contact aliens. The most famous effort was undertaken in 1974, at the the Arecibo facility, when a radio transmission compiling binary code images of DNA double-helix strands and human bodies, was beamed to a giant star cluster known as the Hercules cluster some 24,000 light years from Earth.

Also back in the early 1970s metal plaques with pictures of humans and our solar systems were fixed to the Pioneer probes, as were gold records of sights and sounds of our planet and species were attached to the twin Voyager spacecraft, all of which are now sailing in at the edge of our solar system. They are all destined to sail through deep space into our Milky Way, probably for eternity or until another advanced space-faring civilization stumbles across it. Even today, robotic space missions to planets and beyond have earthly messages affixed to them in the hopes of one day being found by alien civilizations.

But some great minds say that this new active SETI plan perhaps may be taking it too far, exposing ourselves to certain unknown risks.

The great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is the most vocal opponent of announcing our existence on a cosmic bull horn. He points out that right here on our own planet, historical encounters with more advanced societies, like between the Europeans and Native North Americans, have generally not gone too well for the more vulnerable, less advanced side. Aliens may not be so friendly after all, and may instead be much more human — violent and greedy.

Others say there may be a reason why we haven’t heard anything. It could of course be because we are indeed alone, or as a few speculate, perhaps aliens civilizations remain quiet because they know something we don’t. Wouldn’t it then be best to keep a low profile and just listen instead?

However arguments against an active-SETI program using targeted, high-powered transmissions may be pointless. Since the first television signals went out back in the 1930s-1950s, all those shows from Dragnet, I Love Lucy and even Hockey Night in Canada are propagating out into space and have now reached out to a radius of 50 tot 70 light years out. So if there is anyone listening at those outer limits, they could theoretically now already be trying to decode those very same noisy old broadcasts.

Do you think it’s a good idea for us to actively try and signal possible alien civilizations? Share your thoughts in the comments.