The Best Way Yet to Talk to Aliens (If They’re Out There)

“None knows whence creation arose; And whether he has or has not made it; He who surveys it from the lofty skies. Only he knows—or perhaps not.”

This is an edited snippet from a 3,500-year-old Vedic creation myth. I sent each of its 143 characters streaming on a beam of radio waves on June 21, toward a place called Gliese 526, a red dwarf star nestled in the constellation of Boötes some 17.69 light-years from Earth. In early 2031, after traveling 300,000 kilometers in each and every intervening second, my beam will wash over Gliese 526 and any accompanying planets. If someone (something?) in that star system has the right sort of radio telescope pointed at the right region of the sky as my message whispers past, that telescope could detect and record it, perhaps revealing its ancient, cryptic musings about the origins of the heavens and the Earth to an entirely new and alien audience.

Since 1960, a handful of Earthbound astronomers have been using large radio telescopes to ardently (and, so far, fruitlessly) look for any talkative aliens transmitting exactly as I just did. The effort is called SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and is relatively uncontroversial: no one sees any harm in listening. The wisdom of transmitting, on the other hand, has been hotly disputed ever since the first major attempt in 1974, when the SETI pioneer Frank Drake used the world’s most powerful radio telescope, the 1,000-foot-wide Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico, to beam a complex message toward M13.

Some SETI practitioners see