Researchers Call For Interstellar Messages To Alien Civilizations
San Jose, California - Is it time to send deliberate messages to the stars, in the hopes of reaching alien civilizations? Advocates in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) say that moment is long overdue. But other researchers want to take a more cautious approach and seek an international consensus before outing Earth to the rest of the universe. Scientists in both camps faced off today at a debate held at a meeting of AAAS (publisher of ScienceInsider) here.

Douglas Vakoch, the director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, doesn't dismiss the need to consider ethical or political issues, but says that it will be tough to achieve a consensus. "It's 'either-or' thinking," he says. "Either we have international discussion, or we transmit. We should be doing both." But David Brin, an astrophysicist and science fiction author here, says that Earth's relative radio quietude should not be changed so radically, so quickly. "If you're going to transform one of the major characteristics... of our planet, we've learned that small groups shouldn't do that peremptorily."

Since the SETI movement began in the 1960s, it has mostly involved using radio telescopes to listen to bands in the electromagnetic spectrum for something out of the ordinary. In contrast, instances of active SETI, also called Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or METI-beaming deliberate messages to the heavens-have been much rarer. In 1974, a radio message was broadcast from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico toward a cluster of stars 25,000 light-years away. Brin says there have been other "stunts." In 2008, for instance, the tortilla chip company Doritos sent an advertisement from a radar station in Norway to a potentially habitable star system 42 light-years away.