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Beatles may rile aliens

SCIENTISTS have warned that transmitting songs into deep space could put the Earth at risk of an alien attack.

They voiced fears that advertising humanity's place in the universe – as happened last week when NASA broadcast a Beatles song towards the North Star – could attract the attention of aliens who are less friendly than ET.

"Before sending out even symbolic messages, we need an open discussion about the potential risks," Dr Douglas Vakoch, of the SETI Institute told New Scientist magazine.
SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – plans more broadcasts from its base in Mountain View, California. For the past 20 years, it has used radio telescopes to scan for alien radio messages.

Now, they say, we should be actively sending out friendly signals to the stars. "SETI's big mistake is that it's relying on ET to do all the heavy lifting," said Dr Richard Gott, an astrophysicist from Princeton University.

Barrie Jones, an astronomer with the Open University, said there was an "unofficial embargo" about alerting potentially unfriendly species. "The chances are slight, but the consequences would be huge – the end of life on Earth," he said.

"If they have the technology to cross interstellar space to reach us, they will be so much in advance of us humans that there is nothing we could do to resist them."

However, other astrophysicists point out that humanity has been advertising itself to neighbouring stars since the first commercial radio transmissions of the 1920s. By now, those early broadcasts will have travelled nearly 90 light years – some 540 trillion miles. And at least one physicist at SETI is confident that "first contact" will be more like Steven Spielberg's friendly encounter in ET and less like Ridley Scott's horrifying Alien.

Dr Seth Shostak said that if there are extraterrestrials listening out for us, they will have already had plenty of experience of Earth's culture. He is sanguine about the possibility of unfriendly attention, saying: "It's quite paranoid, given that the one thing we know about aliens – if they do exist – is that they are very, very far away.

"Military radar signals have already penetrated deep into space and early broadcasts of Star Trek and I Love Lucy are washing over one star system a day. "If they're listening, they already know we are here."

from news.com.au