Fine Structure

NewScientist is currently running an article about sending and receiving messages from outer space in an attempt to hear from or send a message to other life in the galaxy. The article covers a couple interesting messages we've sent in the past as well as some listening programs and what we might send in the future. Unfortunately, it lends only a couple sentences to what might be the most important discussion around the topic of contacting life elsewhere: who can tell what we might contact? Here's the paragraph about sci-fi author David Brin:

[He] was a member of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI panel until 2006. He resigned when the committee backtracked on the wording of a protocol that called for discussion before deliberately broadcasting into space. "I dislike seeing my children's destiny being gambled with by a couple of dozen arrogant people who cling to one image of the alien," says Brin. Since then three other members have quit for similar reasons.

I'm not coming down on either side of the fence just yet but I understand Brin's reasoning. Blindly broadcasting into space because a couple people decided that we should is terribly irresponsible. Optimists hope for contact with a peaceful, technologically-savvy species that would improve conditions for humans. Pessimists fear that planets like ours are valuable and rare in the galaxy and new species would surely try to exploit it.

Like anything, these are probably two extremes that seem nice in their respective hollywood movies but the most possible scenarios are probably somewhere in between. We clearly need to think more about how, where and what we broadcast into space and in the meantime listening a little more closely to the stars can't hurt us. At any rate, we're very far from even our closest neighbors and sending a message to other systems or having visitors from elsewhere in the galaxy would undoubtably take a long time. We're all alone, for now.