Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could be taking the wrong approach. Instead of listening for alien radio broadcasts, a better strategy may be to look for giant structures placed in orbit around nearby stars by alien civilisations.
New research indicates that it is enormously more efficient to send a long message as a physical package, a cosmic FedEx, than as radio wave or laser pulse. These findings could change the radio-only strategy employed by most SETI programs worldwide.
A new study suggests it is more energy efficient to communicate across interstellar space by sending physical material?a sort of message in a bottle?than beams of electromagnetic radiation. Currently, the bulk of the effort to identify extraterrestrial civilizations has focused on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Frank Drake, a pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), has warned that for any intelligent aliens trying to search for us, "the Earth is going to disappear" very soon because of the growing use of technologies that do not leak radio noise into outer space that extraterrestrials might be able to hear.
Richard Carrigan, Jr., a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory warns that scientiststs should think about decontaminating potential SETI signals to reduce the risk that the signals could carry harmful information similar to a computer virus.
Walter Simmons, a physicist at the University of Hawaii, together with his colleague, Professor Sandip Pakvasa, have come up with a clever scheme that would allow interstellar broadcasters to keep the coordinates of their home planet secret by taking advantage of advances in quantum cryptography.
A Russian astronomer is taking an active approach to SETI by sending messages from Earth into space to announce the existence of the human race.
American composer, Andrew Kaiser, suggests that the structure of terrestrial music might provide clues to creating interstellar messages that could be understood by extraterrestrial intelligence. In the process, he suggests that music may provide a means of communicating "something of our consciousness that is essentially human, regardless of the civilization from which it emerges."
Thousands of computers around the world have joined the search for extra-terrestrial life through a screensaver. But scientists are now wondering what we should say if ET happened to phone us.