Greeny News

more we consider the possible consequences of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, the better prepared we

Nobody would have believed in recent years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched more closely and intensely with human intelligence. "

begins in 1898 HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which is followed by a military invasion by Martians. Contact with foreigners may be a common theme in science fiction, could also be a serious problem in science?

In fact, I could. Since 1960 with the first serious search for radio transmissions from other civilizations (known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), scientists have thought about what would happen if the evidence of ET were found. Examples of their efforts include the 2010 conference of the Royal Society of Inquiry into "The detection of extraterrestrial life and the consequences for science and society."

Last week, the Guardian reported in a recent article, directed by Seth Baum from Penn State University on the subject, the categorization of some of the possible consequences - ranging from beneficial through neutral harmful

So what's the point? We never saw these little green men, why spend the effort to think about what could happen?

Scientists have already faced this problem in real life. The first occasion was in 1967 when astronomers at the University of Cambridge with a new radio telescope detects regular spikes of deep space. They were puzzled because no source known to do. One possible explanation is HE, and the group's director, Nobel Laureate, Sir Martin Ryle, suggested that they should keep quiet about his discovery and dismantling of the telescope, because if someone ends up on Earth ET start signal, alerting possibly evil alien intelligence to our existence.

Fortunately, he quickly concluded that this was a natural source - actually discovered pulsars. But there is a controversy in the SETI community, whether it is appropriate to address and contact by sending messages. For example, the main SETI researchers have agreed on a protocol for how to spread the news as long as we find ET, but have not yet been able to reach a common position on whether to send of messages.

Can we say anything about ET that leads us to first decide whether to look at everything, and the adequacy of our research to your nature, and finally the ability to send signals? My own position, as I argued in a paper presented at the Kavli Royal Society Centre last year is that our total ignorance about the nature of HE means that we can not say whether listening or speaking is good or bad.
For example, sending a message can cause a bad HE to come and destroy us. Alternatively, we can preserve it from destruction by HE realized that we see in our cities and are concerned about the aggressive nature of new civilizations, but was reassured by the content of a message of peace.