Houston, we have a problem! The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) needs our help. For close to fifty years the good folks at SETI have scanned the skies above for signs of alien life, and so far, have come empty handed, so to speak. The boffins are perplexed and have launched a website to collect messages from people around the world. Why? Because so far what we have sent into space is far too boring for aliens to take notice of us.
Consider this: in the early 1970s NASA sent a couple of plaques stuck onto its Pioneer spacecrafts to show prospective aliens looking for a new home what we looked like. Follow me over the orange bar, this is dead, ahem, serious.
To me it looked like we sent them porn, a gauche invitation to come and leer at our strange anatomy and perhaps smite us all in indignation. What were they thinking? I can just imagine Yob from the planet UR looking at the plaque: "Wow! Them aliens look delectable without clothes but what are they doing sending smut into our space? Let's invade them!"
Another message sent to the bemused aliens was from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico: this time it depicted the human form in so few pixels that it would take another millennia for interested parties to work out the shape of our reproductive organs.
Douglas Vakoch, who is the director of interstellar message composition at SETI, says that the problem stems from the fact that we are sending vague ideas about us, with little detail:
"Might not an advanced extraterrestrial species, savvy in the ways of intelligent beings, notice that something was missing from ourselves? An acknowledgment of our flaws and frailties seems a more honest approach than sending a sanitized, one-sided story. Honesty is a good starting point for a conversation that could last for generations."
Ha! Good point. I think we should shower them with minutiae. That would get them to start paying some attention to us. Send them your laundry list, your ever-growing credit card statement, your resume (just in case), that letter from a distant uncle asking for forgiveness, receipts from the IRS, your CIA profile....you know what to do.
As for myself I'm going to compose a recipe, something like a vegetable ragout, no meat, in case they get ideas that they can eat us parboiled or worse, medium rare.
It is Saturday, we need to send a firm message to those aliens, and explain in great details what we want....like a nice new and shiny planet because ours is on the skids and we'll need to vacate it someday, so please contact SETI and send them your writing effort, we don't want to disappoint aliens now, do we?