"It's not the Klingons you should be worried about, it's the Borg. We could take the Klingons."
In a bar in San Jose, the beer flows and talk turns to the latest controversy from the SETI Institute, based just down the road in Mountain View. On Friday Doug Vakoch of SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) broached the subject at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here. He proposed that instead of merely searching and listening for signals from aliens, we should actively direct signals to promising exoplanet locations where they might live. The project is also known as METI - messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.
The idea is to use the world's largest radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to message stars within 82 light-years of Earth.
Klingon attack
This has caused a bit of a stink. What we might call the "Klingons argument", made against Vakoch's plan, goes that if we alert a super-intelligent race of aliens to our presence they'll come here and harvest us. Stephen Hawking has warned against shouting about our location to aliens, and this week in a statement so did SpaceX founder Elon Musk and several others, including a couple of SETI researchers based at the University of California, Berkeley, Dan Werthimer and Geoff Marcy, and science fiction author and astrophysicist David Brin.
Speaking at the meeting, Brin called for a moratorium on METI. There should be public debate about the possible risks before we go ahead, he says. The statement says: "Intentionally signaling other civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy raises concerns from all the people of Earth, about both the message and the consequences of contact. A worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent."
Or as Hawking once put it, contact with aliens could do for us what it did to Native Americans when Europeans first came over, "which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."
It's all good fun speculating about aliens, and it has generated much media coverage. But it's not really about the threat of war with aliens. It's about money. In their statement the anti-METI faction raised concerns that the project would cause so much strife amongst scientists and the public alike that it could endanger funding for a broad swathe of similar research projects.
Interstellar message
"The greatest irony of the anti-METI statement is that a couple of its signers advise other METI projects," says Vakoch, who has the awesome title Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute. "For example, Geoff Marcy advises the Message to the Milky Way project, which will transmit a message from Arecibo. Is Geoff exempt from his own moratorium?"
Marcy says he serves on advisory boards for different institutions and it's up to the director of each institution to make final decisions.
"METI requires international discussion, including the voices of all countries, to determine whether to broadcast and what message to send," he says.
So it seems the anti-METI fuss is driven at least partially by infighting over cash.
Even father-of-SETI Frank Drake thinks METI isn't worth the potential cost. That cash would be better spent on regular SETI projects, he says. But Vakoch says an ongoing Active SETI could be launched for a million dollars a year, and a pilot project could be completed for even less. SETI is mostly funded by donations, although many of the researchers at the SETI Institute have their own grants from places such as NASA and the NSF.
There's no doubt that SETI is a massive long shot, but the possible payoff is so huge that it's got to be worth it. But then some controversy like this comes along and it makes you think about it a bit harder. Don't we have better uses for that money? Well, it's not public money so on balance I'd say not. My gut feeling is we're not going to find evidence of aliens through SETI, but the inspirational power of such an undertaking is gigantic.
But back to the important question. Could we take the Klingons? No way! They have cloaking devices, interstellar warp drives, weapons of mass destruction that dwarf our own. We wouldn't stand a chance. Bring on the Borg - better to be assimilated than annihilated.
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