Humans, as cosmic newcomers that had just invented radio telescopes, should search and listen. Morrison, Drake, and the young Carl Sagan supposed that extraterrestrial civilizations would “do the heavy lifting” of establishing powerful and expensive radio beacons announcing their presence. Just months later, radio astronomer Frank Drake turned an 85 foot radio telescope dish towards two nearby sun-like stars and conducted Project Ozma, the first SETI listening experiment. Modern SETI got its start in 1959, when astrophysicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Phillip Morrison published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, in which they showed that the radio telescopes of the time were capable of receiving signals transmitted by similar counterparts at the distances of nearby stars. Zaitsev- Chief scientist of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, and head of the group that transmitted interstellar messages using the Evpatoria Planetary Radar telescope.
The two sides of the debate faced off in a recent special issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, resulting from a live debate sponsored in 2010 by the Royal Society at Buckinghamshire, north of London, England. Zaitsev’s actions stirred divisive controversy among the community of scientists and scholars concerned with the field. The specifications of these commercial signals have not been made public, but they were most likely much too faint to be detectable at interstellar distances with instruments comparable to those possessed by humans.
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These included a transmission in the fictional Klingon language from Star Trek to promote the premier of an opera, a Dorito’s commercial, and the entirety of the 2008 remake of the classic science fiction movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. In the wake of the Evpatoria transmissions a number of smaller former NASA tracking and research stations collected revenue by making METI transmissions as commercially funded publicity stunts. The 70 meter radar telescope at Evpatoria is the second largest radar telescope in the world. Although Zaitsev was not the first to transmit an interstellar message, he and his associates where the first to systematically broadcast to nearby stars. The new strategy was called Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). In all, transmissions were sent towards twenty stars within less than 100 light years of the sun. Similar additional transmissions were made from Evpatoria in 2001, 2003, and 2008. The project was funded by an American company called Team Encounter and used proceeds obtained by allowing members of the general public to submit text and images for the message in exchange for a fee. Without consulting with other members of the community of scientists involved in SETI, a team of radio astronomers at the Evpatoria Radar Telescope in Crimea, led by Alexander Zaitsev, beamed an interstellar message called ‘Cosmic Call’ to four nearby sun-like stars. Should we beam messages into deep space, announcing our presence to any extraterrestrial civilizations that might be out there? Or, should we just listen? Since the beginnings of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), radio astronomers have, for the most part, followed the listening strategy.
(credit: Henrique Alvim Correa, 1906, for the novel “The War of the Worlds”) The illustration from Well’s novel shows a Martian fighting machine attacking the British warship HMS Thunderchild. The eminent physicist Stephen Hawking warned that “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn our well for the Native Americans”. Although opponents of METI seldom explicitly invoke the spectre of alien invasion, some do view the human history of colonialism as a possible model for how aliens might treat us. As an opponent of British colonialism, he wanted his countrymen to imagine what colonialism would be like from the other side. Wells’ portrayal of Martian imperialism had a political message. Drawing on the science of his times, Wells envisioned Mars as an arid dying world, whose inhabitants coveted the lush blue Earth.
Wells published his classic “The War of the Worlds” in 1897. The prospect of alien invasion has sent shivers down the spines of science fiction fans ever since H.
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