Nation & World

Thirty-five years ago, a gold-plated record was lofted into the cosmos with a greeting card for the first extraterrestrials who found it. The golden plaque, attached to the Voyager spacecraft, was etched with a medley of Earth sounds, from a baby's cry to musical selections ranging from a Bach fugue to Chuck Berry's upbeat "Johnny B. Goode."

Not long after the probe was launched, a psychic played by Steve Martin on "Saturday Night Live" revealed that aliens had promptly delivered this urgent four-word response: "Send more Chuck Berry."

The news last week that a concerted scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence by the SETI Institute in California has resumed raises fundamental questions: If we made contact, what would we say? And what answers would we anticipate?

The first words of a conversation initiated by aliens were immortalized in a 1953 New Yorker cartoon by Alex Graham: "Take me to your leader." Our own greetings have already been inadvertently transmitted, if not delivered, in random radio broadcasts that are just now reaching roughly 100 light-years away. Among the first images that escaped the earth's atmosphere was a 1936 telecast of the Nazi-produced Olympics.

If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, two giant hurdles would have to be overcome to have a conversation. Dialogue would probably be intergenerational — a response to a message sent by us would likely be delivered to a distant descendant. "You should think of METI messages" — referring to "messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence" rather than searching — "as being like time capsules, rather than like telephone calls," said Michael Busch of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Moreover, could we find a common language? Maybe science, because, said Jacob Haqq-Misra, a research scientist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, "physical principles, such as the structure of a hydrogen atom or the action of gravity, likely apply everywhere in the galaxy." (No matter how many rehearsals for the magic moment, even a canned cosmic quote can be flubbed in nerve-racking real time. Remember Neil Armstrong's "one small step for a man.")

Still, in an era when bureaucrats produce contingency plans for every eventuality, it strains credulity to imagine that no protocol exists to carry on a conversation that may already have begun.

"There is, in fact, a protocol developed by the International Academy of Astronautics and the International Institute of Space Law," said Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research. "It boils down to, if you get what looks like a signal from another civilization, then let the whole world know, but don't reply until there's been international consultation. The real challenge is to get that international consultation going before we know if anyone's out there."

The Voyager's record carried greetings in 55 languages, including a folksy one in Amoy, a Chinese dialect, which was translated as: "Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time."

But some scientists warn that an invitation, or even contact, would make us vulnerable to evil aliens. "The biggest thing I'd want to get out of the conversation is information about the ET's values," said Seth Baum, a doctoral student at Penn State and executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.

"Do they want to help us, harm us or do something else? This is crucial because in all likelihood the ET civilization will be more advanced than ours and thus able to get what it wants."

Other scientists suggest that given the number of radio and television broadcasts that have leaked into the universe, aliens may already know we're here.

If space aliens are benign, maybe their goal is to foster a cooperative conversation here on Earth. "There is only an infinitesimal chance that the plaque will ever be seen by a single extraterrestrial, but it will certainly be seen by billions of terrestrials," B.M. Oliver, vice president for research at Hewlett-Packard, said after the Voyager, which is still hurtling into space at nearly 100,000 miles an hour, was launched.

"Its real function ... is to appeal to and expand the human spirit and to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence a welcome expectation of mankind."

In other words, where's Chuck Berry now that we need him?