You know how sometimes somebody talks to you, but they're saying so much boring stuff that you eventually start to ignore them? The truth is that we have been unintentionally sending radio signals into space for the last century, out of which seven decades of television transmissions, meaning that we have covered at least one hundred light years of space around the Earth with our messages, thus if an alien species intelligent enough to have radio technology exists in this range, they could in theory watch our TV shows.

However, most of these transmissions are plain boring, thus we might have been already banned from the alien chat lines forever. In the early 1960, the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence experimen, or SETI for short, was conducted at the Cornell University to search for powerful naturally occurring radio signals, and one decade later NASA picked up the program to use it to scan the sky for any evidence of intelligent radio transmissions. At the same time, the program was used to send detailed description of physics and biology on Earth, in the hope that somebody will respond.

The first possible alien transmission was picked up by SETI's antennas on August 15, 1977, representing a strong radio signal presenting characteristics of intelligent design, the so-called WOW! Signal, although the transmission quickly disappeared and hasn't been detected ever since. It remains the most likely candidate for the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever received. Several similar signals have been detected over the years, but they were quickly dismissed as false alarms, since they all came from human designed instruments.

Nevertheless, if we were to study the content of our messages, taking into consideration that the extraterrestrial species receiving the message are more advanced than our own, we might find that these messages pose no interest to them. Thus, in 1999 Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas started to compose messages in their own languages that would contain more interesting information.

But to compose an interesting message you must first know what aliens would consider interesting to them. According to Dutil, the answer is relatively simple: since we assumed that they would be more advanced than us, then they would not be interested in our small technological achievements, but rather in the social feature of our society, which should present them with some new information. However, these subjects have already been described by physicists.

Another topic of discussion Dutil thinks might pose some interest is the age old problem of politics and especially democracy, as there is so far no perfect election system available, thus we might ask them what procedures they use on their planet.

Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at SETI, agrees with Dutil in the fact that we are currently sending messages about information ET probably already knows, therefore pose no interest. He argues that we should stop bragging about our low technological advancements and start designing messages that show what human beings truly are.

However, interstellar communication poses some serious problems as light does not travel instantaneously through space, thus if an intelligent extraterrestrial species received our messages it could take another century until we detect their reply, in case there is one. But what if we are not able to decode their message? We ask them to repeat the transmission, then wait another century until they respond? This kind of information exchange could take millennia and is plain innefficient.

Therefore, Vakoch thinks a better idea would be to send a lot of information at the same time like a whole encyclopedia or something.

Given the experience on Earth and the encounter of a culture with a more advanced one, such communications could possibly end in a disaster for us, and we might just find ourselves at the end of a gun barrel enslaved forever. We just hope that in case ET receives our messages and decides to visit our planet it is intelligent enough to have peaceful intentions.