From Gerry Harant
Investors will do well to steer clear of John Walker’s SETI scheme which, he
says, may offer instant wealth to those “downloading” high-grade alien
intellectual property
(Letters, 5 December, p 54).
Even if these aliens live as close as 20 light years away, two-way
communications would take 40 years. Besides, the sort of aliens he imagines
would also have a commercial “culture”, so that downloading would involve
haggling about the inevitable quid pro quo, each round of negotiations taking a
further four decades plus the usual legal delays. Get rich quick? Hardly.
Strangely, SETI proponents do not advocate the reverse procedure of sending
information into space rather than merely listening. A hundred transmitters of
100 kilowatts each, directed along the galactic plane, would surely ferret out
all those alien intelligences within a mere 100 years.
Besides, such a project would cost lots to run and be of absolutely no use to
humanity, thereby fulfilling some of the current preconditions of “big”
science.
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Blackburn, Victoria
