Gonzaga Debate Institute 2011 Mercury Scholars seti aff

METI CP

(Casey, “The Eerie Silence: Should We Be Sending Messages Into Space?,” The Daily Galexy, January 30, NS)

After a half-century of scanning the skies for intelligent extraterrestrial life, astronomers have little to report but an eerie silence, eerie because many scientists are convinced that the universe is teeming with life. The problem could be that we've been looking in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and in the wrong way. At this week's conference at London's prestigious Royal Society, Paul Davies, astrophysicist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University, discussed a new roadmap for the future of SETI, arguing that we need to be far more expansive in our efforts, by questioning existing ideas of what form an alien intelligence

might take, how it might try to communicate with us, and how we should respond if we ever do make contact. There has also been controversy recently over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard, some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away. Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs. They assume that they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it. While such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn't human, at least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than "Shoot us". Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn't think much of these worries either way. A proponent of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical investigation. Though whether writing a paper saying "This METI thing we're doing has only a tiny chance of working" is overall a good idea remains to be seen. An important point is that METI represents an intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien interception of some random radiation from Earth - the difference between saying "Hello!" and just being a suspicious strange noise late at night. Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close examination. We can't suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason - in fact, we'd better hope that an advanced civilization doesn't catch an episode of "American Idol" and just vaporize us outright.
Actively transmitting for messages is dangerous
Folger, Editor at Discover, 11

(Tim, January, Scientific American, Volume 304, Issue 1, p40-45, EBSCO, “Contact the Day After”) PG