“Space entrepreneurs plan to beam best wishes on Saturday toward five sun-like stars, hoping intelligent beings will get the message.”
I wonder if the American Indians, in retrospect, would consider it a good idea to send “Hello! We’re over here!” messages to the rest of the word?
Yes, I realize that we’ve been broadcasting signals into space from radio and TV for a long time. But this is a signal designed to “remain comprehensible through interstellar space”, which I take to mean it might be more likely to be detected than an ‘I Love Lucy’ episode.
In any case, don’t they see that a subjugation scenario is at least possible?
So apparently “Team Encounter” has taken in over $2 million; I wonder how much it costs to rent transmitting time on the big dish in the Ukraine?
Stupid article doesn’t even say which stars they’ll be sending to, or how far away they are. The transmission is supposed to include a mathematical “Rosetta Stone”, which is fine, but as you said, we’ve been broadcasting for about a century now, and any alien species within that range, who were technologically advanced enough to travel light years just to subjugate somebody, would probably already know we’re here.
Actually, we haven’t really been broadcasting that much that would be detectable at long ranges. Some of the narrowband transmissions like high-powered radar would be detectable at long ranges, but don’t neccesarily give much information. If you take a look at the sci.astro FAQ at http://sciastro.astronomy.net/sci.astro.6.FAQ, they go into detailed calculations of how far away various signals can be detected.
A very complex message including information about the Earth, humanity and our location in the galaxy as already been sent. In 1974 the Arecibo radio telescope beamed a message to the star M13, 24,000 light years away. It is too late!
According to the organization’s Web site, they are sending signals to stars in five constellations, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Big Dipper (technically an asterism, not a constellation), and Cancer. Unfotunately, the organizers have not specified the exact stars they are beaming to, so I can’t tell how far off they are. The only constellation whose major stars I can talk about off the top of my head is Orion, which has Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka, three blue supergiants around 1,000 lightyears away; Betelgeuse, a red giant between 300 and 400 lightyears away; Rigel, 800 lightyears distant, and Bellatrix and Saiph, whose distance I can’t remember. In any event, it’s a cinch that none of those stars have any lifebearing planets, so we’re safe from that lot.
Assuming that that the signal goes out and remains coherent enough to be picked up by a distant civilization with radiotelescopes, whose existence we also have to assume, and assuming that that civilization has space flight, even if they can fly at a significant fraction of light speed we will have to wait thousands of years for the man-eating aliens to arrive. By the time they get here, we’ll likely have wiped ourselves out anyway.
Well, I wouldn’t bet civilization on there being no faster-than-light capable predatory races out there.
If I were a predatory FTL civ, I’d use my warp drive to send probes around stars that wobble such a way that there’s large planets around them. When the probe detects signals from a civilization, it would send an FTL signal (or itself) back to the home planet or nearest base. Then the invasion force warps into said solar system and loots and pillages and anally probes and stomps strange designs in the wheat fields.
Far fetched? Extremely. Impossible? I doubt it. I don’t see the above scenario as being as any more far fetched than any positive scenario.
Maybe not, but look what happened to the Native Americans anyway. I wouldn’t worry too much.
I tend to think a technologically more advanced society might not be necessarily bad for us. After all, they have gotten to that point without destroying themselves - we haven’t yet, and may not. We might learn a few handy things.
Being wrong on this WAG could mean the end of all human life, but I can, ah, live with that. I think that any civilization traveling light years to visit Earth would not need much from us or our planet. 100 gallons of salt water, some soil, and some new porn would probably get them to the next system. If they couldn’t almost perfectly recycle everything they would never have made it here to probe our rectums and crash.
The annoying part is that intelligent aliens might not even consider us worth a wave and a nod.
C’mon aliens, show yourselves! I double-dog dare you.
The article says “Among those messages is an Interstellar Rosetta Stone, using a mathematical language to convey information about Earth and its human inhabitants.”
I don’t know what that means or how it works, but I imagine it’s a problem they took into consideration, Guin.
We are finding sea animals on beaches that we have never seen before. In other words, we don’t even know what is on our own planet. For all we know, there could be intelligent life at the bottom of the ocean sending cryptic bubbles up to us that we iterpret as whale farts.
Until we are capable of actually going out to those planets and knocking on few doors, I don’t think anybody out there cares or is looking for pathetic intergallactic spam from earth.
And you would think by now that our intelligent human form would be able to really communicate with at least one animal species on earth, other than some dubious hand signals with an ape or two. If we can’t have a serious conversation with a beagle, then what the hell are we doing wasting money by trying to communicate with unkown life forms?
