Alpha-Centauri Put on Earth's
No-Call List
Santa Cruz, CA | The SETI Institute this week confirmed it had received an answer to Earth's first attempt almost 30 years ago at direct radio contact with intelligent life in outer space.
Initially, the staff was elated to successfully detect a digital signal from our solar system's closest neighbors.
But then they decrypted the terse reply which stated, in part, Alpha-Centaurians were not interested in any further communications, and were more than a little annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of dinner.
In 1974, the massive Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico was aimed at the nearby star cluster, and a gazillion-watt signal carried a brief binary message. It has been a long wait for the message to be received and answered.
Frank Drake, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), was understandably crestfallen. "Apparently, they mistook our transmission for some kind of advertisement - maybe for satellite dishes or discount air fares or something. I guess we should have sent a less ambiguous message."
Ironically, Drake is the same astronomer who headed the original Arecibo project. "Perhaps next time we might try starting a game of tic tac toe or something," he stated. "Maybe someone in Epsilon Indi will want to play."
