Should Humanity Try to Contact Alien Civilizations?

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Is it time to take the search for intelligent aliens to the next level?

For more than half a century, scientists have been scanning the heavens for signals generated by intelligent alien life. They haven’t found anything conclusive yet, so some researchers are advocating adding an elementcalled “active SETI” (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) — not just listening, but also beaming out transmissions of our own designed to catch aliens’ eyes.

Active SETI “may just be the approach that lets us make contact with life beyond Earth,” Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said earlier this month during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Jose. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life]

Seeking contact

Vakoch envisions using big radio dishes such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to blast powerful, information-laden transmissions at nearby stars, in a series of relatively cheap, small-scale projects.

“Whenever any of the planetary radar folks are doing their asteroidstudies, and they have an extra half an hour before or after, there’s always a target star readily available that they can shift to without a lot of extra slough time,” he said.

The content of any potential active SETI message is a subject of considerable debate. If it were up to astronomer Seth Shostak, Vakoch’s SETI Institute colleague, we’d beam the entire Internet out into space.

“It’s like sending a lot of hieroglyphics to the 19th century — they [aliens] can figure it out based on the redundancy,” Shostak said during the AAAS discussion. “So, I think in terms of messages, we should send everything.”

While active SETI could help make humanity’s presence known to extrasolar civilizations, the strategy could also aid the more traditional “passive” search for alien intelligence, Shostak added.

“If you’re going to run SETI experiments, where you’re trying to listen for a putative alien broadcast, it may be very instructive to have to construct a transmitting project,” he said. “Because now, you walk a mile in the Klingons’ shoes, assuming they have them.”