October 30, 2017 8:30 pm

Tuesday, the StarTalk All-Stars Ask, “Should We Be Trying to Contact Extraterrestrials?”

To call or not to call? We’ve all pondered this decision in our lives. Should we contact someone? What if they’re unfriendly? What if they don’t know who you are? What if that someone is an intelligent extraterrestrial species that will end our existence?

Alright, maybe we haven’t been in that last situation, yet. However, this week on StarTalk All-Stars, SETI Senior Astronomer and host Seth Shostak, comic co-host Chuck Nice, Allen Saakyan, host of the Eureka! Science Comedy podcast, and Doug Vakoch, president of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), debate whether interstellar communication is something humanity should be doing. Recorded live at Worlds Fair Nano, this episode is brimming with philosophical questions on the nature of our communication with ET and if we should be trying in the first place.

Join us as we learn all about METI and its plan to contact ET, what Doug would want to include in that message, and why Seth thinks we should dump the entire internet into a message for extraterrestrials to sift through.

You’ll also hear about the Pioneer plaque, why interstellar communication could be best as a form of “reciprocal altruism,” and why humans really do have something to offer on a galactic scale.

Personally, I lean towards sending messages out. As mentioned on the show, it might already be too late for us. If a hostile extraterrestrial species wants to annihilate us, our fate might already have been sealed once they catch a glimpse of the I Love Lucy episodes we’ve been beaming out since the early beginnings of television broadcasting. So, I say we keep sending messages. The vastness of the universe is overwhelming, and it’s possible we won’t hear anything back for lifetimes, or ever. But, we definitely won’t hear anything back if we don’t try at all.

Do you think we should be trying to contact ET? Tell us in the comments below!

Please join us tomorrow night for Looking for Life in the Cosmos: StarTalk All-Stars at Worlds Fair Nano at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our All-Stars channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too. And remember that you can also catch next week’s StarTalk All-Stars episode one week early on TuneIn, at tunein.com/startalkallstars.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen