Scientists report: Aliens avoid us because we're boring

Probably you'd expect this item in the Weekly World News rather than New Scientist, but there you are.

Yet there it is: "ET too bored by Earth transmissions to reply" [8 December 2006].

Canadian astrophysicist Yuvan Dutil and "fellow researcher" Stephane Davis posit the idea that sending out streams of mathematical data already known by any civilization sophisticated enough to receive our signals is a losing proposition.

"The question is, what is interesting to an extraterrestrial?" Dutil told New Scientist. "We think the answer is using some common ground to communicate things about humanity that will be new or different to them – like social features of our society."

Douglas Vakoch, who directs message compilation for SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) agrees that we will need interesting message traffic to catch alien attention, but also points out some problems.

"If someone replies to your message saying, 'I don't understand. Can you repeat that?' it will take decades, centuries or millennia to know," says Vakoch.

"Another approach is to send a lot of stuff and hope there is enough redundancy for them to spot patterns," he adds. "We could just send the encyclopaedia."

Dutil agrees other options are worth exploring, but points out that sometimes only a message will do. "It would make sense to have an 'answer phone' message ready in case we are contacted," he explains, "just to say, 'we'll get back to you,' while we figure out what to do."

I was going to close this with some smart-ass suggestions of what to send--or better yet what NOT to send--but I think I can safely leave that to the creativity of the individual reader.