Broadcasting?

[mmcirvin]

From a Washington Post article about astrobiology:

In addition, the private group SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has been broadcasting radio messages to hoped-for intelligent aliens for years and listening for a response -- sometimes with NASA support -- but has been met so far with silence.

If I were a member of the SETI Institute, I suspect I'd be annoyed by this: "Do they think we don't know about the speed of light?" In fact, all actual efforts to send messages to extraterrestrials thus far have been symbolic tokens, sent with no hope of a response; the SETI Institute's projects just watch and listen.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Both Pioneers had plaques and both Voyagers had discs. Besides Arecibo, there was also some eccentric private effort a few years ago that solicited messages from the public for a fee, if I recall correctly.

What if everyone out there who we'd like to hear from is also in LISTEN-ONLY mode?

I once asked SETI researcher Paul Horowitz about that, and he said an assumption of most SETI efforts was that Earth's technological civilization is very young, and that we're listening for older ones; someone who's had radio technology for a hundred thousand years might have the resources to make it reasonable to do a lot of transmitting specifically to be heard.