SAN JOSE, calif. — Astronomers have their own version of the single person’s dilemma: Do you wait by the phone for a call from that certain someone? Or do you make the call yourself and risk getting shot down?
Instead of love, astronomers are looking for alien life, and for decades, they have sat by their telescopes, waiting to hear from E.T. It didn’t happen. Now some of them want to beam messages out into the void and invite the closest few thousand worlds to chat or even visit.
Others scientists, including Stephen Hawking, think that’s crazy, warning that instead of sweet and gentle E.T., we might get something like the planet-conquering aliens from “Independence Day.”
But calling out there ourselves might be the only way to find out whether or not we are alone, and humanity might benefit from alien intelligence, said Douglas A. Vakoch. He is director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
The dispute broke out Thursday and Friday at a convention in San Jose of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Last week, several prominent space experts, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk and planet hunter Geoff Marcy, started a petition cautioning against sending out such messages, saying it is impossible to predict whether extraterrestrial life will be benign or hostile.
Vakoch was hosting a separate conference Saturday at the SETI Institute on the calling-all-aliens proposal and what the messages should say. The idea is called active SETI. According to Vakoch, it would involve the beaming of messages via radar and perhaps eventually lasers.
We’ve been sending radio and TV signals out to the cosmos for about 70 years — though less now, with cable and satellite sending shows directly down to Earth. In fact, each day, a new far-off planet might be just now catching the latest episode of the 1950s sitcom “I Love Lucy,” said astronomer Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.
There have been a few small and unlikely-to-work efforts to beam messages out there in the past, including NASA sending the Beatles song “Across the Universe” into the cosmos in 2008. NASA’s Voyager probe recently left the solar system with a “golden record” created by Carl Sagan and a message, and the space agency’s New Horizons probe will also have greetings on it by the time it exits the solar system.
But what scientists are talking about is a coordinated and sustained million-dollar-a-year effort with approval from some kind of science or international body and a message that people agree on.
It’s an “attempt to join the galactic club,” Vakoch said.
But science fiction author and astrophysicist David Brin said he thinks inviting aliens here is a bad idea. Even if there is a low risk of a nasty creature coming, the consequences could be extreme.
“I can’t bring myself to wager my grandchildren’s destiny on unreliable assumptions” about benevolent aliens, Brin said.
