14 DAY TRIAL // Although direct actions to engage alien life forms in dialog are believed to be a thing belonging to the modern age, astronomers say that this idea is actually almost two centuries old. Nearly 150 years before the first radio message was sent in space via radio transmissions, some daring scientists pondered the possibility of contacting potential inhabitants of near-by planets with the help of optical devices. Because the invention of the radio was still decades away, they had to make do with whatever little means they had at hand at the time.
"You go with what you know. Once it was realized that all the planets go around the sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth. The idea blossomed in the 17th century into the 'plurality of worlds' debate, but it remained controversial," shares NASA's chief historian, Steven Dick. He argues that Galileo and Kepler, among others, were the first to ponder the idea of life on other planets, while at the same time remaining attentive to the censorship imposed by the Catholic Church.
In the 1820s, German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss advocated one of the first daring plans of establishing communications with possible inhabitants of other planets, when he proposed the deforestation of a large portion of Siberian forest, in such a manner that a huge triangle would be seen from space. "The size and color contrast should have made the object visible from the moon or Mars, and the geometric figure could only be interpreted as an intentional construction," Florence Raulin-Cerceau of the Alexandre Koyre Center in Paris wrote in the French magazine Pour la Science.
In the 1840s, astronomer Joseph von Littrow came with the idea of digging a 30 kilometer-wide circular canal, which would have been filled with kerosene and then lit at night. He reasoned that the appearance of the shape only at night would increase the chances of it being detected by potential life forms living on other planets.
In 1869, Charles Cros, a French poet and inventor, advocated the use of mirrors to focus light from powerful electric lamps towards the Moon or Venus, or even to encode messages in the way the light was to be switched on and off. British statistician Francis Galton also supported this idea around 1896, when he set out to create a message encoding system that took into account the fact that Martians or Venusians might not have the same base 10 number system as we do, on account of them having less than 10 fingers, or maybe none to speak of.
Currently, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative is using powerful satellite dishes and strong radio signals to attempt to make contact with other potential civilizations. Gold discs encrypted with our planet's location and a brief history of our world are flying around the cosmos on various space probes. Yet, the biggest chance we have of getting a hit back is from monitoring and emitting radio waves, as they are the most capable to withstand the harshness of space and keep themselves together over extremely long distances.