Expert: Beware of contact with aliens

An Australian scientist who this week was given a $100 million boost to help search for extraterrestrial intelligence has warned of the dangers should aliens ever make contact with Earth.

Professor Matthew Bailes said humans must ‘think very carefully’ if aliens were ever to contact us, as anything from outer space that is intelligent enough to send a signal will most likely be smarter than us — and thus most probably more dangerous.

Earlier this week physicist Stephen Hawking teamed up with a Russian billionaire to launch a new quest to discover life on other planets.

The celebrated scientist gave his backing to Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives project, which will provide $100 million over the next decade to those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Mr Milner, an entrepreneur who made his fortune through investments in technology companies such as Facebook, said he will harness the innovation of Silicon Valley to scan the skies for signs of life, including searching the entire Milky Way and 100 nearby galaxies

The Breakthrough Listen branch of the project will use the world’s finest telescopes to carry out state-of-the-art radio and optical surveys.

Bailes, a Swinburne University academic was only told a few days earlier that he would lead the Australian team searching the skies.

Cue excitement. Could we make contact with a lovable alien like E.T?

Bailes urged caution if we discover a signal sent by aliens, evoking memories of the chaos depicted in the film Independence Day when extraterrestrials set out to destroy earth. “I think we should think very carefully before we reply to a signal received from outer space. The history of weak civilisations contacting more advanced civilisations is not a happy one.”

“The difficulty is to know what sort of signal we are looking for. There is no manual on how to find aliens. We’ll have to imagine the sort of transmissions an alien race might send, and a variety of strategies will have to be deployed ranging from looking for single bursts to signals that might be more encoded in other transmissions.

“The signal is likely to be quite feeble after coming vast distances. We’ll need to be looking for advanced civilisations that have significantly more transmission grunt than we are capable of on Earth.

“Hopefully they send a transmission pattern we can recognise such as prime numbers, or a mathematical construct at a frequency that might have some significance to us.”

“We could be really lucky and find something coming from tens of light years away, but it is far more likely to come from thousands of light years away.

“Even if we discovered one tomorrow we’d all be long dead and buried before we could reply and the aliens would get an answer,,” he said.