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Extraterrestrial

Should we beam the Internet in to space ?

By T.K. Randall
April 3, 2015 · Comment icon 48 comments

Would it be wise to send everything about us in to space ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 BDEngler
SETI director Seth Shostak believes that we should broadcast the entire Internet in to the cosmos.
It's no secret that SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has been looking to step things up a notch recently.

While up until now most of their efforts have focused on listening out for radio signals, plans have been set in motion in recent months to begin actively broadcasting messages in to space in an attempt to reach out to anyone who may be listening. Some scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, have dismissed the move as dangerous due to the risk of attracting hostile aliens.

Now however Seth Shostak has proposed taking things even further still by broadcasting, not only a message, but the contents of the entire Internet out in to the cosmos for somone else to pick up.
"Such a large corpus - with its text, pictures, videos and sounds - would allow clever extraterrestrials to decipher much about our society, and even formulate questions that could be answered with the material in hand," he wrote in The New York Times.

Shostak proposes using a laser, as oppose to a traditional radio transmitter, to send the data and maintains that it would significantly speed up communications with a distant alien civilization.

"Simple back-and-forth exchanges would take decades," he wrote. "This suggests that we should abandon the 'greeting card' format of previous signaling schemes, and offer the aliens Big Data."

Source: Yahoo! News | Comments (48)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #39 Posted by lightly 9 years ago
hm, and then once the aliens get hooked on the internet.. we start charging them huge monthly fees!* what if all they want to do is download old western movies, and start dressing like cowboys? oh well, we'll have to wait and see what happens.
Comment icon #40 Posted by AstralHorus 9 years ago
sending porn,cats, and people hurting themselves into space? im down
Comment icon #41 Posted by stevemagegod 9 years ago
I Support this. In fact the Bible says that the aliens loved are women so sending Porn out into space would indeed be a welcome format to connect with.
Comment icon #42 Posted by Harte 9 years ago
I Support this. In fact the Bible says that the aliens loved are women so sending Porn out into space would indeed be a welcome format to connect with. I agree. Maybe it would keep the aliens in their Mom's basement eating Chee-Tohs long enough for us to get our sheet together and get ready to fight them off. Harte
Comment icon #43 Posted by RSF 9 years ago
Only the late P Klass can top this guy as Super Debunker of the Century. And I told Shostak as much. After his death, Klass was reported to admitted before his death he was contracted by the CIA to debunk UFO claims. Shostak's running around doing the same thing, just different shoes.
Comment icon #44 Posted by JamieSymptom 9 years ago
What a bizarre idea. 'The Internet' is a network, how do you beam a network into space? If he means to beam some of the contents of The Internet into space - it's still a silly idea. Sure, an advanced enough extra-terrestrial civilisation MAY eventually determine that this stream of radio data is definitely of intelligent and purposeful origin, but it would still have a few things going against it: 1) The vast distances that would have to be involved ensure that the information would be out-of-date on a scale we can't really comprehend. 2) How exactly would they reverse-engineer the binary int... [More]
Comment icon #45 Posted by Podo 9 years ago
I think if they want to, they could. But if not...why? I don't think it would do any harm, since it makes us loud and easily detectable for other civilisations to see and find. That's how we're looking for life, after all; we're searching for the biggest, loudest civilisation that we can find. Or, don't, because who really needs millions of Cat gifs?
Comment icon #46 Posted by MysticStrummer 9 years ago
Seems counterproductive if SETI actually wants to make contact one day. Earth would instantly become like the crazy guy on the street corner that most people avoid because he's talking so loudly to himself about nonsense.
Comment icon #47 Posted by -M7 9 years ago
This may actually be a bad idea when you consider that any "advanced enough" civilization out there could access it. And by any, that includes hostile ones. Though of course all that data would cause investigation by the curious. I think the reason we haven't discovered anything similar to this by over civilizations is because they may have experienced "foreign access" to their systems, those that survived either stopped broadcasting or did something to make it "more secure"; for instance: interstellar communications they have and so on. Basically there is a reason we haven't "heard" anything ... [More]
Comment icon #48 Posted by TheGreatBeliever 9 years ago
Wait til u see theirs. They might have penis they use as belts


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