There’s a really interesting article over at Seed Magazine about the dangers of Active SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Active SETI is different than normal SETI in that its practitioners use powerful radio transmitters to send out messages to star systems that could potentially have life. Some of you may have SETI@Home installed on your computer which is Passive SETI- it just listens for messages from aliens coming our way.

There has recently been a storm of controversy raging in the SETI community about the active side of the group based on two counts- one is that the people sending out messages aren’t conferring with the rest of the world about what they are saying; and two, the dangers of giving away our presence to potentially ass kicking alien cultures.

SETI doctrine states that anyone we hear from will almost certainly be much more advanced than we are. Simply put, our capabilities are so rudimentary that any chance of detecting an alien transmission would require that it be broadcast powerfully and continually on millennial timescales. We can’t predict much about alien civilizations, but we can use statistical mathematics to derive simple, robust relationships between the number of putative civilizations, their average longevity, and their population density in the galaxy. The chance of getting a signal from another baby race like ours is infinitesimally small. As Shostak says, “We’ve had radio for 100 years. They’ve had it for at least 1,000 years. Let them do the heavy lifting.”

This is one reason why most SETI pioneers advocated a “first, just listen” approach. But there is another: What if there is something dangerous out there that could be alerted by our broadcasts? This ground has been explored in numerous scientific papers and, of course, in countless works of science fiction. Few people alive today embody the convergence of hard science and fictional speculation better than David Brin, an author of both peer-reviewed astronomy papers and award-winning science fiction novels. In an influential 1983 paper titled “The Great Silence,” Brin provided a kind of taxonomy of explanations for the lack of an obvious alien presence. In addition to the usual answers positing that humanity is alone, or so dull that aliens have no interest in us, Brin included a more disturbing possibility: Nobody is on the air because something seeks and destroys everyone who broadcasts. Like Billingham and Michaud, he feels the PSG is dominated by a small number of people who don’t want to acknowledge Active SETI’s potential dangers.

The article is fascinating, swing over to SEED to read the whole text.

(+10 Sci-Fi Geek Points if you know where the image above is from)

Link [SEED Magazine]