If all goes according to plan, Keanu Reeves is now on his way to Alpha Centauri.
The Day the Earth Stood Still, which stars Reeves, is being beamed into space in real-time on Friday, to coincide with the film's release on terra firma.
The movie is a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic, in which an alien cautions Earthlings that they must change their ways or be destroyed.
The broadcast is aimed at Alpha Centauri, which, at four light years away, is the nearest star system to Earth and might have rocky planets and the potential for life.
The interstellar film release joins a growing number of deliberate shouts into the void, including Doritos commercials, the Beatles song Across the Universe, phone calls, and craigslist ads.
Twentieth Century Fox, which produced the film, gave a tongue-in-cheek nod to the possibility that extraterrestrials might be listening in. Alpha Centauri could boast an "untapped possible consumer base," the company said in its press release.
But this latest transmission does raise a question. Are we representing ourselves well as a species?
SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak, who was a science consultant on the film, shrugged off the concern that we might not be putting our best face on.
Given the glut of incidental radio and television signals that already escape the planet, he told the New York Times, people "might best begin by shutting down the radar at the local airport."
But others say that, beamed tightly enough, a radio signal could stand out above the general murmur of Earth noise. "Anyone with a big enough dish can appoint themselves ambassador for Earth," the journal Nature cautioned in 2006.
While the chances are remote, deliberate transmission could pose real risks. One possibility is that Earth messages might "reveal some peculiar flaw in our psychological make-up that alien 'black-ops' specialists might start working out ways to exploit,"
Link:
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/short ... arest.html
