After years of listening for alien signals and developing ways of reaching out to an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization, scientists are now pondering whether or not humanity should shout out loud into space.
At the SETIcon convention, famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said that contacted extraterrestrials are likely to harm us, so he advised that we do not make a big fuss out of being here.
He said that any civilization with which we could communicate is likely to be more technologically advanced and much older than us, and so they would probably have the ability and maybe a motive to destroy humanity along with our planet.
This divided the experts at the convention, like John Billingham, for example, former chairman of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Committee of the International Academy of Astronautics, who said that no one could guarantee that there was no risk to transmitting, and that he agreed with Hawking.
On the other hand, Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute, said that “Even if they [aliens] tend to be hateful, awful folks, can they do us any harm at interstellar distances?”
Until now, SETI efforts have focused on capturing and recognizing signal from outer space, and as Billingham said, listening for signs of life is safe, but sending out signals of our own could be an unwise decision.
He recommended an international conference to help decide whether we should point our noses into space or not, depending on the entire world sustaining “active SETI,” or METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or not.
Robert Sawyer, a Canadian science fiction author agreed and said that “We've got to stop and think about this, whether this is a wise thing to do.”
SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak strongly disagreed and said that an international consultation is a sign of “naivete of the first order” to him.
He added that in any case it was already too late for this debate as humanity has been sending signals into space for decades, through electromagnetic radiations emitted by every radio and television broadcast, an effect called leakage.
He added that any civilization that is advanced enough would easily be capable of capturing these signals, and that there was “no point in losing sleep” over this matter.
Vakoch said it would not be logic for aliens to invade Earth as coming all the way here would take a lot of time and energy, and travel costs as well as transporting Earth resources back to their home would not be productive for them.
Shostak agreed and said that this would be just like “ordering a book from Amazon and paying $60,000 for shipping,”
SPACE.com relates.
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