Lonely Planet

The SETI community, if that’s the right term for it, continues to be stirred up by some members’ plans to switch from purely passive listening for alien radio signals to the active beaming of signals in the direction of sun-like stars. Last year even the journal Nature editorialized against this kind of thing. And in September, two members of a SETI-related study group resigned in protest.

From a piece last week by David Grinspoon in Seed:

“We’re talking about initiating communication with other civilizations, but we know nothing of their goals, capabilities, or intent,” reasons John Billingham, a senior scientist at the private SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Billingham studied medicine at Oxford and headed NASA’s first extraterrestrial search effort in 1976. He believes we should apply the Hippocratic Oath’s primary tenet to our galactic behavior: “First, do no harm.” For years Billingham served as the chairman of the Permanent Study Group (PSG) of the SETI subcommittee of the International Academy of Astronautics, a widely accepted forum for devising international SETI agreements. But despite his deep involvement with the group, Billingham resigned in September, feeling the PSG is unwisely refusing to take a stand urging broad, interdisciplinary consultation on Active SETI. “At the very least we ought to talk about it first, and not just SETI people. We have a responsibility to the future well-being and survival of humankind.”

Billingham is not alone in his dissent. Michael Michaud, a former top diplomat within the US State Department and a specialist in technology policy, also resigned from the PSG in September. Though highly aware of the potential for misunderstanding or ridicule, Michaud feels too much is at stake for the public to remain uninvolved in the debate. “Active SETI is not science; it’s diplomacy. My personal goal is not to stop all transmissions, but to get the discussion out of a small group of elites.”

It all sounds pretty scary. The number of stars that fall within the ballooning expanse of our earliest radio, TV and radar signals is rising exponentially. And conceivably the only other civilizations out there are rapacious conquistadors, survivors of eons of Darwinian struggles — in other words, more or less as Western civilization was, when it conquered the “heathen lands” of Earth.

Then again … as the writer Stanislaw Lem (Solaris) liked to point out, there is something deeply naive about the idea of meaningful communication with a truly advanced civilization. Against some cosmic Cortes we would not be like the doomed Aztecs. We would be like so many ants, unable even to apprehend the power with which we dealt. The idea that such a power would bother to “conquer” us is absurd. Indeed, its very alien-ness, to our narrow, ant-like ways of seeing, might render it more or less invisible — so that it could come and go as it pleased, even as our “elites” denied its existence and fruitlessly pumped energy into the void in a “search for intelligent life.”