Is Shouting at the Cosmos Wise?

[Overdog]

I just came across this article by David Brin, and found it very interesting.

 

LF Special Report: Shouting at the cosmos

 

What do you think? Is shouting at the cosmos wise?

[Overdog]

So we don't cover territory Dr. Brin does not intend, I have found a clarification from David Brin himself related to the article on his position,

 

David Brin here. Thanks for the effort to be fair, George. Though frankly, turning my "vehemence" into a topic was also surprising and off-topic.

 

For the record, I did not choose the lurid illustrations that the Lifeboat Foundation web guys liked so much. I complained mildly, without vehemence, and shrugged when they insisted.

 

As for potential dangers other than slathering alien badguy meanies, well, anyone who cannot imagine other scenarios of regret from METI that do not involve instant attack are simply people who suffer from lack of scientific or morphological imagination What they illustrate is the same blithe eagerness to assume that their view of the horizon is the only view possible.

 

As someone who has scanned more horizons - and more scenarios, from plausible to weird - than most people, I can tell you that the salient fact is how LITTLE of that horizon we have covered, so far. All I've suggested is that we listen a while longer, as new kids in a strange forest, and get to know the lay of the land, before shouting our heads off.

Sentient Developments: Brin's position on the METI issue clarified

[Moontanman]

I just came across this article by David Brin, and found it very interesting.

 

LF Special Report: Shouting at the cosmos

 

What do you think? Is shouting at the cosmos wise?

 

To me it depends on how serious you take the theory of relativity, if light is indeed the ultimate speed limit then we are in little or now danger, if there is a way around light speed limits then it might be a good idea to keep our heads low until we too can break the speed limit. any way you look at it we are announcing our existence to the universe via radio signal leakage into the universe.

[Overdog]

To me it depends on how serious you take the theory of relativity, if light is indeed the ultimate speed limit then we are in little or now danger, if there is a way around light speed limits then it might be a good idea to keep our heads low until we too can break the speed limit. any way you look at it we are announcing our existence to the universe via radio signal leakage into the universe.

 

I read a sci fi novel about this once, a very paranoid alien species with some advanced technology lived just 40 light years away. They detected us, and decided we were a threat. They launched box-car sized relativistic projectiles at .7c in our direction (the novel didn't expound on exactly how they did this, so suspension of disbelief was required). So it took a couple hundred years for the projectiles to arrive. The projectiles were designed to adjust trajectories to home in on any significant sources of radio emissions. By the time the projectiles arrived, we had colonies on Mars, Titan, and a few other places, and had found the DNA of Jesus and Budda, from which we had created clones who were natural born leaders. The projectiles took out earth, and all our major colonies, but under the leadership of the Jesus/Budda clones, we survived in the Kuiper belt and, very quietly, rebuilt civilization. Then, when the time for vengeance came, there was no turning the other cheek....