The Seti Institute is asking the world for advice on what we should say to any passing aliens – but what if they land in Ireland first, asks KEVIN COURTNEY.
IF ALIENS made contact with you, what would be your first words to them? This time last week, you might have said, “Hi, I’m your FF candidate for Alpha Centauri – I hope I can rely on you to put tentacle to paper and give me your first preference on Friday.”
This week you’d probably say, “Take you to our leader? Er . . . we’re not quite sure if he actually is our leader.”
Most of us, though, would go for a simple greeting: “Hi, we are bankrupt. Send cash.”
The world may befacing financial Armageddon, and Fianna Fáil facing total annihilation, but the search for alien life-forms carries on regardless. The Seti@home project, in which amateur astronomers and home computer owners help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is 10 years old this year, although Seti’s origins go back to 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake, now its president, pointed an 85ft radio telescope at the stars.
Since then, Seti has been tirelessly sweeping the vast emptiness of space, hoping to isolate an intelligent sound from the babble of white noise, cosmic interference, and phone-in radio shows.
If contact is made, though, some wary types believe the last thing we should do is send a reply, as this would be the equivalent of the Aztecs jumping up and down and shouting, “Cooee! Here we are!” to the Spaniards.
So far, Seti has found nada, but perhaps it knows something we don’t know, because it has set up a new project, Earth Speaks
(earthspeaks.seti.org), inviting the public to answer a crucial question: “If we discover intelligent life beyond Earth, should we reply, and if so, what should we say?”
First impressions are very important when introducing yourself to a new species; you don’t want to let humankind down by making a cosmic gaffe or inadvertently insulting the citizens of Epsilon 4. Some of the suggestions posted on the website include: “Don’t land here – no intelligent life”; “Please stay on the line – your message is very important to us”; and “Can you acknowledge this transmission? If not, we’ve wasted millions of taxpayers’ dollars on nothing.”
Some believe Seti would be better off searching for the things we’ve lost over the past 50 years – Shergar, perhaps, or those Anglo Irish millions. But the institute is intensifying the search by building a new facility at Hat Creek in northern California which, when complete, will consist of 350 dishes scanning a million stars across 10 billion radio channels.
The Irish are doing their bit in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Paddys in Space website (paddysinspace.com) claims to have 450 members working in unison to persuade ET to land on the old sod. Their mission statement is: “Let’s find them aliens and bring them for a pint!” But, if ET chose our tiny little island out of the vastness of the Milky Way to make their first contact, what kind of message should we send, and in what language?
Some reckon we should use computer binary code, or the language of pure mathematics, but why not send them cúpla focal. After all, we’ll be dealing with a highly advanced civilisation whose intelligence is vastly superior to ours – if they’re so smart, let’s see them try and work out the modh coinniollach.
Should ET accept our invitation to drop in for a pint, how should we welcome them? The open-topped bus always works for our winning (and losing) teams, so that would be an option. And it would already be decked out in green, so that’s handy.
No point getting Brian Cowen to greet the delegation from Andromeda – they’d want to meet someone with real power. Bono might be a possibility: he’d spout off the requisite new-agey guff about all species being one, and those bug-eyed shades would make help them feel right at home. But then he’d probably start ballyragging them to drop the intergalactic debt before moving all U2’s finances onto their planet.
We could give Pat Kenny one more close encounter with something completely alien to him – but he’d probably say something like: “I’ve finished studying these Earthlings, take me home.”
Or perhaps we should send the Green Party to greet them – they’re all at sea right now, and looking for a planet to save. And if the aliens prove hostile and take over the Earth, at least the Greens will have someone else to go into coalition with.
