Proposal to reach out to aliens touches off debate

Some warn inviting aliens to visit might be a terrible idea.

SAN JOSE, CALIF. — Astronomers have their own version of the single person’s dilemma: Do you wait by the phone for a call from that certain someone? Or do you make the call yourself and risk getting shot down?

Instead of love, of course, astronomers are looking for alien life, and for decades, they have sat by their telescopes, waiting to hear from E.T. No word has come, and now some of them want to beam messages out into the void and invite the closest few thousand worlds to chat or even visit.

Other scientists, including Stephen Hawking, think that’s crazy, warning that instead of sweet and gentle E.T., we may get something like the planet-conquering aliens from “Independence Day.” The consequences, they say, could be catastrophic.

But calling out there ourselves may be the only way to find out if we are not alone, and humanity may benefit from alien intelligence, said Douglas A. Vakoch, whose title — for real — is director of inter- stellar message composition at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

This dispute broke out Thursday and Friday at a convention in San Jose of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Several prominent space experts, including Space X founder Elon Musk and planet hunter Geoff Marcy, have started a petition cautioning against sending out such messages, saying it is impossible to predict whether extraterrestrial life will be benign or hostile.

Vakoch is hosting a separate conference today at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute on the calling- all-aliens proposal and what the messages should say.

The idea is called active SETI, and according to Vakoch would involve the beaming of messages via radar and perhaps eventually lasers.

Humans, with no intention of contacting off-worlders, have been sending radio and TV signals out to the cosmos for some 70 years. In fact, each day a new far-off planet may be just now catching the latest episode of the 1950s sitcom “I Love Lucy,” said astronomer Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

There have been a few small and unlikelyto-work efforts to beam messages out there in the past, including NASA sending the Beatles song “Across the Universe” into the cosmos in 2008.

AP Some astronomers are proposing to aim their best radars and lasers out to the sky to say “We’re here, call us” to the closest few thousand worlds. The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has a million watt transmitter.