YOO HOO… ANYONE OUT THERE…SOMEWHERE?
(…we’re friendly Earthlings and can give you a real good time…wanna party?)

A Russian oligarch has just donated some one hundred million dollars to expand efforts to discover evidence of intelligent, sentient, extraterrestrials…somewhere…out there in space. Apparently he believes by funding a more pro-active approach for such efforts…we may eventually find some.

Of course, advances in technology are now making it possible to reach out even further into the great beyond of space than we have before, so such an infusion of hard cash is expected to not only expand the fields of search, but also, to make that search much more comprehensive and precise. What this means is that instead of passively just listening for signals from such extraterrestrials, we’ll now be proactively acting like a bunch of happy hookers hollering…yoo hoo…anyone out there…somewhere? We’re friendly Earthlings and can give you a real good time…wanna party?!

There are a number of questions that should be asked here, however, and one of the first that comes to mind is this: Do we really want to let some potentially higher order of beings become more acutely aware of our presence? They may already be well aware of it, and, because of our record of performance to date, are just not too keen to acknowledge that fact. We humans have clearly demonstrated that, as a species, we are a highly toxic one, with a high propensity for mayhem and slaughter, multiplying like manic lemmings, and polluting every corner of our tiny world. Not exactly the kind of folks anyone would care to have any sort of connections with…even if it’s at the arms-length of mega-light years distance from each other.

A second, and much more important question is this: Given all of that, and, having demonstrated our intentions of reaching out from our own back yard of space, first with tiny Voyager, which we sent off some years ago and now left to wander about out there like a galactic hitch-hiker; followed later by our Moon shots, the Space Station , Hubble, our Mars Rovers, our potshots at Saturn and one of those Meteorites, and, after a decade long trip, our Unity machine is now busy prowling around and scanning Pluto, before ultimately also going off to wander in those further reaches of who-knows-where in space…wouldn’t that be sufficient cause to make any extraterrestrials extremely nervous about having any contact with us? And being nervous… decide to do it to us…before we can do it to them?

Yes, we’ve imbedded declarations of benign intent and friendliness in all our space machines, but, given our record, how believable would such declarations be to those who might come across them?

Then again, we humans have such a high level of hubris about our significance in this universe, we may be overlooking another obvious question: Why are we assuming that such extraterrestrials, if they do exist, have evolved to a level similar to ours, when in fact they may still be back at the stage we were several million years ago? In which case, could they even comprehend anything about what and who we are?

We have to admit it’s all very intriguing, and since we’re so driven by our curiosity impulses about anything we encounter, or any questions that come to our minds…we will continue with such explorations and probing as long as our species continues to exist. What may come of such efforts none of us can predict, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

But here’s one more question to ponder over: How did this thing we call the Universe come about in the first place? What was there…before that big bang of some four and a half billion years ago filled it with all those billions and billions of fragments…which includes our tiny blue dot of a world?

Well, odds are…we’ll never really know.

CENTURION