"We were a peaceloving people until 'Achey Breaky Heart' - now DIE, Earthlings!"
Posted on 02/07/2008 5:50:54 PM PST by BGHater
It's not as though Nasa is beaming out the Cheeky Girls back catalogue or the collected works of Florence Foster Jenkins.
Nevertheless, scientists warn that transmitting songs into deep space could put the Earth at risk of an alien attack.
They voiced fears that advertising humanity's place in the universe - as happened last week when Nasa broadcast a Beatles track towards the North Star - could attract the attention of aliens who are less friendly than ET.
Dr Douglas Vakoch of the SETI Institute, which has been leading the search for extraterrestrials, told New Scientist magazine: "Before sending out even symbolic messages, we need an open discussion about the potential risks."
They voiced fears that advertising humanity's place in the universe - as happened last week when Nasa broadcast a Beatles track towards the North Star - could attract the attention of aliens who are less friendly than ET.
Dr Douglas Vakoch of the SETI Institute, which has been leading the search for extraterrestrials, told New Scientist magazine: "Before sending out even symbolic messages, we need an open discussion about the potential risks."
A recording of the Beatles' Across the Universe was last week beamed in the direction of Polaris, also known as the North Star, by Nasa.
SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - plans more broadcasts from its base in Mountain View, California.
For the last 20 years, it has used radio telescopes to scan the skies for alien radio messages.
After getting nothing but static, some of its researchers have decided that listening for aliens is not enough.
Instead, they say, we should be actively sending out friendly signals to the stars.
Dr Richard Gott, an astrophysicist from Princeton University, told New Scientist: "SETI's big mistake is that it's relying on ET to do all the heavy lifting.
"We'll all just be sitting round listening, but nobody's doing any talking."
A group of scientists is calling on SETI to broadcast a simple pulsed signal that reveals the presence of intelligent life on Earth.
Others want more recordings of the type included with the Voyager and Pioneer space probes.
Nasa attached engravings depicting humans and our planet to the outside of the craft, and aboard it put tapes of voices, birdsong, music, and maps of where Earth is.
"It's very charitable to send out and encyclopaedia, but that may short-change future generations," said Dr Vakoch.
Professor Barrie Jones, an astronomer with the Open University, added that there is an "unofficial embargo" about alerting potentially unfriendly species to our presence.
"The chances are slight, but the consequences would be huge - the end of life on Earth," he said.
"When you look at the history of colonisation on Earth, it is pretty bloody awful.
"If they have the technology to cross interstellar space to reach us, they will be so much in advance of us humans that there is nothing we could do to resist them."
However, other astrophysicists point out that humanity has been advertising itself to neighbouring stars since the first commercial radio transmissions of the 1920s.
By now, those early broadcasts will have travelled nearly 90 light years - some 540trillion miles.
Radio waves, like other forms of electromagnetic radiation, travel at the speed of light - around 186,000 miles per second.
This means it would take a radio broadcast four years to reach the closest star, Alpha Proxima, which is just over four light years away.
But at least one physicist at SETI is confident that "first contact" will be more like Steven Spielberg's friendly ET and less like Ridley Scott's horrifying Alien.
Dr Seth Shostak said that if there are any extraterrestrials listening out for us, they will have already had plenty of experience of Earth's culture.
He is sanguine about the possibility of unfriendly attention, saying: "It's quite paranoid, given that the one thing we know about aliens - if they do exist - is that they are very, very far away.
"Military radar signals have already penetrated deep into space and early broadcasts of Star Trek and I Love Lucy are washing over one star system a day.
"If they're listening, they already know we are here."
"We were a peaceloving people until 'Achey Breaky Heart' - now DIE, Earthlings!"
“We get signal!”
“Main screen turn on!”
I would hope so after Brittany Spears and Fify Cents. Then again, I don't think they really want to come here. It would corrupt whatever culture they have.
5.56mm
Anything by Yoko Ono will surely result in the Earth being vaporized from space.
We’ve already got an alien invasion, so it matters not.
Let the bodies hit the floor...
Hey Earth, do you mind! We’re trying to get some sleep out here.
Yeah, if I were sittin' there in the Sirius star system and got a load of Ginger and Mary Ann I'd be taking the first space ship to Earth for sure. Seriesly.
This was covered in a Science Fiction novel I read a while ago but can’t recall the title. Essentially a planet knows there are bad aliens out there so they shield all outward emissions. The next thing they do is set up a “tar baby” in another system. That planet spews EM on all frequencies at massive levels. It’s like a roach motel...aliens arrive and find...they can’t leave.
It was a neat novel, wish I could remember the name or author.
I’ve heard chilling rumors.........that they are leaving their ships in Mexico, and are sneaking accross the border - unseen. Slipping over here in the dead of night. (The ships would be a dead give-away.)
They are everywhere, now, and if they want you - you don’t have a chance.
Remember that not only physical distance matters in this, that is, the distance from Earth to the nearest world capable of supporting not just life, but intelligent life. It is also a factor of time.
The Earth is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old. The age of the oldest star in the Milky Way galaxy is about 13 billion years. Life on Earth has existed for about 3.7 billion years, but intelligent life, for less than a few hundred thousand.
And most important of all, intelligent life capable of communicating with another world, for a mere 75 years.
Now granted, for whatever reason, life on Earth was almost wiped out several times, and had to pretty much begin again at a primitive level.
Even if our intelligent species is able to communicate with other worlds and lasts 1 MILLION years, what are the odds that our *time* will intersect with another intelligent species able to communicate with other worlds, even if it lasts 1 MILLION years? Tiny.
Then multiply that time with those great distances found in the galaxy.
Perhaps 1 billion years ago, such a species existed just 1,000 light years away? But it doesn’t matter, because they are long extinct.
Perhaps 50,000 light years away there is another intelligent species right now. It doesn’t matter, because they are too far away. Even if they were looking for intelligent life to communicate with, we are just in one tiny spot, in a galaxy 100,000 light years across, and 1,000 light years thick.
The only way around this problem is a “profusion of intelligent life” theory. But using our planet as a model, that is highly unlikely. In 4.5 billion years, and 3.7 billion years of life, Earth has produced only one known intelligent species. In a profusion of intelligent life theory, it should have produced tens of thousands of intelligent species.
Will beaming songs into space lead to an alien invasion?
It's already working!
Reagan talked about “aliens” in a couple of his speeches (kid you not, I remember useless trivia)
[Before the United Nations General Assembly: “ In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment,” said Reagan, “we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you,” he went on, “is not an alien threat already among us ? What could be more alien to universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?” ]
Yeah, and for some reason they like to congregate in frony of the Home Depot stores!
(half humor ping)
Should we let them know we’re already here?
[I’m here for your TP, and your heavy metal.]
Hell, beam them some heavy metal followed by the “Hillary cackle”, they’ll crap their pants and fly the other way as fast as they can.
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