Not all scientists are sanguine about this, however. One has even called it ‘insanely risky, given the dearth of information we have about the nature of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence’.
John Billingham, a senior figure at SETI and Nasa, even called for a global moratorium on such programmes because of the potential risk to humanity’s future.
Is this paranoia? Hardly, if you remember the lessons of our history.
For when an advanced people meet a less technologically sophisticated people, the results for the latter are generally catastrophic.
Look at the American Indians, or even worse, the Tasmanian aborigines, who were obliterated after the arrival of European settlers in the early 1800s.
The worst-case scenario of an alien attack on Earth is a staple of science fiction from H.G. Wells’s War Of The Worlds to Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster, Edge Of Tomorrow.
We have no idea how super-intelligent aliens might regard us, but what if they see us as we do cows: a useful source of protein?
Or as mosquitoes: pests infesting a lovely and habitable planet, and best got rid of?
