Final frontier... teaching aliens the rules of cricket

IT IS a sport impossible to explain to Americans, never mind ET.

But now scientists reckon one way to tempt aliens into making contact with humans is to teach them the rules of... cricket.

The move is the next step by members of Seti ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in their attempts to make contact with aliens by actively calling out to the cosmos, instead of just listening.

What is known as Active Seti will be under serious discussion next week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California.

Seti spokesman Dr Seth Shostak wants to flood the ETs with lively content from the internet, rather than bore them with mathematical concepts. He said: “If they look up cricket, there are descriptions, pictures, diagrams showing a pitch, footage. They’ll cross- correlate all this and put it together and if they are clever at all, they will figure out something about cricket.

“Honestly, what do they want to hear from us? Do they want to hear what the structure of the hydrogen atom is? No, they know that.”

Renowned British physicist Professor Stephen Hawking said: “The outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”

And, of course, we would run the risk of further humiliation at Lord’s.

SOON there will be little green men practising their batting if members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence get their way. They hope to begin actively calling out to the cosmos in the hope of finding alien life and think that sending out the rules of cricket will convince anything out there that humans are an intelligent species. Let’s hope it works. With only 10 teams playing test match cricket it would be nice to have some new opponents.