Now, this is a genuinely insightful article about SETI and the search for intelligent life in the galaxy. If there is an interstellar civilisation that has suddenly noticed that one of the local stars is glowing very noisily with radio emissions all of a sudden (I mean, even now repeats of Mr Ed, and Grampian Television weather forecasts are streaking past Tau Ceti, and what do the locals make of that? Rain tonight in Inverbervie...) then they might just fire up the radio telescopes and start firing information at us. I think that this article makes a valid point.
First, how do we know what aliens would consider to be an obvious signal anyway, and then, time lag is a factor, and finally, what is the attitude to interstellar communication? Do you send all of your information in a kind of wiki gesture of intergalactic brotherhood, or do you send out a few interesting tit-bits, and say "if you like this, then send me something of value?" In other words, a kind intergalactic AOL introduction CD.
And even better, to overcome the time-lag, then you have to send a kind of intelligent software agent that would be able to perform long term negotiation to get the right valuable information before giving anything away.
Would have to be fairly hack-proof too! As long as DVD Jon doesn't have a spaceship I suppose we would be OK. "Bad news guys, Kzarkwon the L33t just hacked our agent, and he got the entire contents of the Library of Congress. Seems he wanted the back issues of playboy, which is worrying news for the women of Earth."
Maybe we could write it in ABAP. I wonder what we would have to do to get that past the head of development. "Hi, we would like to do the interstellar trade module." Mind you, wouldn't want Larry Ellison owning the off-planet business now would we?
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