More than 3,000 messages were beamed toward the North Star today by a powerful radio telescope and although the exercise was largely symbolic, it serves to revive a debate over whether we should be trying to contact aliens. But if they're able to pick up today's message, they'll already have known about us from a Beatles song that NASA had transmitted toward Polaris in 2008. This month, METI International's Doug Vakoch provided a not-so-simple response in Nature Physics. But Vakoch had a down-to-earth suggestion for future messages to extraterrestrial intelligence, a.k.a. "Scientists already have a process for judging the merit of METI projects: peer review," Vakoch said. "The repercussions of sending a message and possibly getting a response or even an alien visit are just too great for this to be decided by a small group of scientists alone." Schulze-Makuch suggested that international protocols, presumably established by the United Nations, should determine which messages we address to the aliens and which procedures we follow if we get a reply.
I personally think that this is super cool and will bring so many more opportunities to our planet. We have advanced so much in our technology and its giving us so many new perspectives on things. Also, it will possibly give us the answer to a very broadly talked about subject.
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/asimple-response-messages-aliens/
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