Was sending the Arecibo message a good idea or a bad one?

Hey, reaching out peacefully is always a good idea. And if it takes 25,000 years before it gets read, they won’t be in such a hurry to come attack us. And who know, we might be able to fend off anyone else by then.

It took 3 minutes to transmit, and was basically a ceremonial thought experiment. It’s the champagne bottle smashed on the hull of a new ocean liner.

The fish never notice, hostile or otherwise. But for the people involved it’s a new beginning and the culmination of hard work to get to that point.

Without knowing whether an intelligent, technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilization will be hostile or friendly; it seems to me a bad idea to send an invitation for them to pay us a visit. That said, I’ll be long gone and if we don’t wipe ourselves out as a species, we’ll be incredibly advanced ourselves in 50,000 years. It will take our message 25,000 years to get there, and even if they can travel at light speed (which relativity says they cannot do) it will take them another 25,000 years to get here. So, meh.

Imagine if by chance I could reply: “You’ll be dead?! Dude, they aliens already intercepted and replied to the message 5 minutes ago via twitter. They’re coming our way!”

Yea, I think about this question a lot. There’s probably some baddies out there but for some reason it doesn’t seem likely to me. I mostly imagine a good outcome.

I also wonder if maybe voyager will be seen clearly but in passing by a civilization who doesn’t have the means to go after it but who could tell it was a creation of another intelligent species. For example, imagine if they could see it in telescopes but no technology to fly up and intercept it. Maybe it would encourage a space program on their planet.

Judgind by how we’re doing, and considering we’ve been able to write flor a way shorter time than what it’s going to take for the message to evven reach this potential threat, i doubt it’s ever going to be an issue. We’re probably going to go extinct much sooner than that anyway.

I thought the strength of a signal declines as it spreads out. That is one of the criticisms of SETI. The signal will be undetectable by the time it reaches its destination.l

To Paraphrase SFDebris:
Existence in the universe is like being in Central Park, in the dark, at midnight, prime time for rapists, robbers and murderers alike.
You should not shout “here I am”, or walk into one of the street lights, because that would tell the fiends that there is prey to be slain.
What you should do is move carefully and slowly through the darkness, to look for a policeman, or the exit. Or hunker down and wait for the night to end.

Except in reality, there is no policeman. There is no exit. And dawn never comes.

From the article:

“In fact, the stars of M13, that the message was aimed at, will no longer be in that location when the message arrives.”

:(

It just might be that truly technically superior civilizations have no desire to communicate with war mongering primitives. If civilizations are sprinkled around the galaxy, they must vary tremendously in their stages of development. Clearly, communication at the speed of light is a less than optimum solution for necessary gossip in a region the size of our galaxy. I’d be willing to bet that the big shots in the galaxy have solved some riddles regarding this problem, and I have a feeling that a solution does indeed exist. My own feeling is that we will probably get there ourselves once we better understand the implications of the second law of thermodynamics and particularly the nature of time.

I like the idea of it, but as @Haleth said, kind of worthless in reality.

There’s nobody living in that star cluster as the types of stars are not the kind that would have planets that would hold life.

Frankly it was a stupid location to send the signal. If they wanted to send it somewhere that could possibly have life they should have sent it to the same area that the Kepler mission was looking at.

@Rarebear What Kepler mission are you speaking of? This message was sent 39 years ago. No exoplanets had been discovered then.

@Hawaii_Jake Yes, I know.

The issue is that M13 is a globular cluster of mainly blue giant, oxygen, metal poor stars with some red giant stars thrown in. The chance that life would exist there is pretty nil. http://www.astronomytoday.com/blog/great-hercules-globular-cluster-m13/

The Kepler mission was much later, obviously, and they put some thought into where they were looking. It’s in a completely different area of the sky, relatively close, with lots of stars of variable sizes including many sun-sized stars.

Now, that said, the Aricebo message was mostly a romantic notion anyway. But the details of your question mention the possibility of life there, and I’m saying that from an astrophysics point of view the chance is low. So although it’s romantic to be able to say that a signal is on its way to a beautiful globular cluster, nobody will hear it.

It’s gonna take a little time to find out.

@SecondHandStoke Best answer yet.

^It’s the only answer that doesn’t involve speculation.