Should SETI Turn Active?

Centauri Dreams admits to troubling new doubts about a variant of SETI called METI — Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The notion, also known as ‘active SETI,’ is backed by some members of the SETI community and is especially strong in Russia. Its premise is that rather than listening passively for signs of extraterrestrials, we should actively try to achieve contact through messages of our own. This would constitute a ‘brightening’ of our civilization in the radio sky, making us more noticeable by many orders of magnitude.

A number of intentional signals besides the famous Arecibo message of 1974 have already been sent. The so-called ‘Cosmic Call 1′ message was transmitted from the Evpatoria Planetary Radar site in the Crimea in 1999, targeting four Sun-like stars and sending an overview of terrestrial life written in a code called Lexicon. Cosmic Call 2, sent to five Sun-like stars, followed in 2003. Based on the target list and the distances involved, the window for a possible response to these messages opens in sixty years.

Is this a good idea? We are only beginning to have some understanding of how many planetary systems are out there and to learn about the properties of their largest planets. Knowing what we know now about the tenacity of life on Earth even in the most extreme environments, and knowing that there may well be Earth-like worlds in solar systems throughout the galaxy, we face the real possibility of alerting other civilizations to our presence before we know anything whatsoever about them. This may or may not prove dangerous, but it seems like something that deserves wide discussion.

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http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=834