Why we shouldn’t call E.T.

Article By: Richard Ingham

In 2008, NASA beamed the Beatles song ‘Across the Universe’ into deep space, sending a message of peace to any extraterrestrial who happens to be in the region of Polaris, also called the North Star, in 2439.

“Amazing! Well done, NASA!” Paul McCartney said. “Send my love to the aliens.”

Who could argue with such a well-meaning, positive initiative?

Quite a few, actually.

As the citizens of Planet Earth strive ever more enthusiastically to reach E.T. (should he exist), some experts say numerous messages zipping through the cosmos are confusing or little more than space spam.

Others ask who has the right to represent our world to the galaxy — or question the wisdom of bellowing out our presence in what may be a hostile neighbourhood.

“A lot of the stuff is very responsible, but I do wonder about some of the other stuff that’s being transmitted,” Albert Harrison, a professor of social psychology at the University of California at Davis, said at a conference at the Royal Society in London on Monday.

“There’s pictures of celebrities, of two political candidates — one identified as good, the other identified as evil — snack-food commercials, love letters to rock stars and so on.”

He added: “When you start broadcasting and drawing attention to yourself, you have to be very cautious about the image you give. We might appear as a threat to them.”

“We don’t know what will be made of these messages and it could be years and years before we find out.”

Thirst for aliens

The thirst for contact with alien civilisations has a long history.

The US probes Pioneer 10 and 11, launched in 1972 and 1973, bear plaques of a naked man and woman and symbols seeking to convey the positions of the Earth and the Sun.

Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977 and now on the outer fringes of the Solar System, each carry a gold-plated copper phonogram disk with recordings of sounds and images on Earth.

But, relative to the vast distances of interstellar space, these four scouts are crawling along.

It will take around 40 000 years for Voyager 1, the most distant man-made object in space, to get anywhere close to a star.

No-one knows if there is any intelligent life there to pick up the time capsule… or whether our species will still be around to get a reply.