Speaker’s corner
PONDER for a moment the SKA (square kilometre array), that mass of telescopes to probe deep space nearing completion near Sutherland in the Karoo. Consider, too, the goings-on near San Francisco, where the Americans have installed, into the sides of a dish-shaped wide valley, almost 400 signal-detecting dishes enabling them to transmit into deep space and to receive signals from alien sources.
It is known as the “alien hunter facility”. The whole programme is called Seti – the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It worries me sick.
I am pleased to see that, last month, Steven Hawking agreed.
What should we Earthlings do if we receive an intelligent message from an alien planet? My advice four years ago was: “For Pete’s sake, don’t answer it.”
Hawking says we’d be out of our minds if we did.
A group of scientists has advised that “no response should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place”.
Since space probing by radio waves began in 1959, the most intelligent signal received so far has been a voice repeating over and over: “Your call is important to us, but all our agents are currently busy.”
After a great deal of excitement and a hurried meeting at the White House, at the UN, and frantic consultations in Europe and Asia, it was discovered that a Seti antenna had toppled against a telephone line and connected through to Standard Bank.
The agreement to delay any response to a message from extra-terrestrials is a big relief because the last thing we want is for Earth to attract the attention of some giant planet which might then send double-decker space buses filled with toothy lizard-men, 10m high in their eight stockinged feet.
I can picture them, poking around in frustration, seeking the supposedly intelligent life that sent out the messages and trampling all over us thinking we are merely parasitic organisms.
Even if the reply comes from an itsy-bitsy planet, it might still precipitate an invasion by a life form of inquisitive flea-like beings with, instead of proboscises, laser drills capable of injecting under our skins 50 000 eggs a second that develop into larvae that eat us from the outside.
Ever since scientists set out to communicate with deep space, I have pleaded with them to stop. Rather adopt a kohdasu policy: Keep our heads down and shut up. Who knows what’s out there? There might well be extra-terrestrial creatures every bit as mean as humans: aliens that discover human noses are a great aphrodisiac and harvest them, with pincers. Or they might be monsters the size of road graders and scoop us up to sell back at Planet X-13 to be eaten with cheese dip.
What if they are truly colossal and carry our skyscrapers and railway trains back with them for their mountain-sized kids to play with – after first shaking out all the funny little wriggling two-legged things?
Or they might be cold, slimy, creatures smelling like soiled wet nappies but with hearts overflowing with affection and who’d crawl into our beds at night seeking warmth, eager to snuggle.
It is very likely there is life out there. The Hubble telescope indicates there are 70 000 000 billion visible stars, each being a sun, some with associated planets.
The one ray of hope is that most are zillions of light years away and, if we do receive a signal, it will probably be millions of years old by the time it reaches us.
On the other hand, what if these aliens can travel a million times faster than light and they send remote controlled vacuum cleaners to suck up a sample of our planet – like Durban?