At the Royal Society summer exhibition. With 300 billion stars in the galaxy, they have only just begun to look and they place high hopes in a new project, Breakthrough Listen (“Last month, astronomers on the Breakthrough Listen project announced they had heard nothing after eavesdropping on more than 1,000 star systems within 160 light years of Earth.”) It turns out, we’re the problem:
Dr John Elliott, a reader in intelligence engineering at Leeds Beckett University, said the global Seti community would announce any bona fide alien signal immediately. But in an era of social media that would spark a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories that leave people utterly confused about the truth, he said…
“It makes sense to create a legally binding framework that is properly rooted in international law,” Dominik said. “I’m completely comfortable with taking the whole thing above the level of scientists. If there are public consequences of replying and sending out messages that is a political decision and not one to be taken by scientists.”
Ian Sample, “How should we respond to alien contact? Scientists ask the public” at The Guardian
Some of us think that most of the fake news has been coming from the ET search community itself and that getting international law involved is a way of creating bureaucratic survival even if they hear nothing from extraterrestrials ever.
They are trying to create a legal framework that assumes ET’s existence without evidence.
But look, at least they’re not designing weapons or high tech surveillance…
See also: Do we really need a “plan” for a response to aliens? If a tenth of the effort were put into cleaning up the corruption around peer review,” that would be a better use of time than figuring out what to say to the Klingons or Jabba the Hutt if and when they or theirs finally show up.
Tales of Oumuamua: Why are we still talking about the Oumuamua alien sighting panic?
and
University of Maryland: Oumuamua was not an alien spacecraft “Stick with analogs we know, you advise”? Yes, good idea. It used to be the usual approach among scientists. So why was it suddenly suspended? We are still wondering. Or maybe we know but no one wants to discuss it. See Tales of an invented god.
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