Alien Contact

This is the type of search that I’m involved in. It is, of course, a direct descendant of Drake’s 1960 experiment. My employer, the SETI Institute, is currently using the 1000-foot diameter Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico to examine approximately a thousand nearby star systems for alien transmissions. This type of reconnaissance makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t involve the assumption that the aliens are mounting a prodigious effort to get in touch. If a civilization 100 light years distant has an antenna the size of Arecibo, and beams a signal straight towards us, then a paltry 10 kilowatt transmitter will be sufficient to catch our attention.

NASA The Arecibo Radio Telescope - searching for extra terrestrial life

Finding a signal may be our best hope for locating cosmic confreres. Anticipating this, the Declaration defines a series of steps that researchers should undertake to verify that the broadcast is truly extraterrestrial, and then it urges a rapid announcement to the astronomical community, to local governments and to the public. In other words, if our radio telescopes pick up ET, you’ll quickly be reading about it in the papers. And because so many among the populace are convinced that aliens exist (even to the point of being blasé), there’s little chance of rioting in the streets.

Cover-up?

Mind you, some people, particularly in the United States (where belief in government conspiracy is considered a mark of political sophistication), are sure that a SETI detection would be hushed up rather than let loose on a labile public.

I am amused by this paranoia. Most SETI experiments, including all of the US efforts, are privately funded, and the government has no involvement. More to the point: there is no policy of secrecy within the research community, which means that – even as an interesting signal is being received – the scientists will be excitedly e-mailing friends and relatives.

I’ve seen this process in action on a few occasions, when our experiment has been briefly fooled by picking signals from space probes. These messages from robots that we’ve sent to the edge of the Solar System have many of the hallmarks we expect from an alien signal. While my colleagues and I were looking wild-eyed at the computers, I noted that the government showed no interest. The media, on the other hand, did.