Favorite Quotes from Life in the Universe Essays:

Every term, each student in my Astronomy 115 course (Life in the Universe) was assigned to write an essay giving his or her opinion on the following question:

This group of quotes concerns radio communication with extraterrestrials. (The typos and misspellings are real, but they are not mine.) The material is presented here without comment; you will have to make up your own.

Essay Quotes: Communication


1. Every day astronomers listen for any kind of sound that might be from a distance planet with intelligent life.


2. The likely hood of us ever running across their signal or us theirs is just too small.


3. But the real question here is, are the aliens going to be able to define our messages, or will it be a mess of weird symbols and lines to them?


4. I think that we will never be able to contact them and never be able to have a close encounter with the extraterrestrials. The reason I say that is because when we send out a radio frequenceies to the extraterrestrials the frequency must first get through our atmosphere, then travel far distance and not get absorbed or altered in the gas and dust clouds in the galaxy, then if it survived that then be able to get through the atmosphere of the extraterrestrial planet. Then we have to hope that they are on the same frequency and bandwidth as us so they can receive it and the same thing goes for us. Another reason is that something could have made a small noise and we don't know for sure if it was another extraterrestrial planet trying to contact us.


5. It takes a long time for messages to travel through outer space so maybe we have to by for the messages to finally reach us.


6. If there is ET outside of the Milky Way, in other galaxies, I believe that we will never have the technology to efficiently communicate with them, because the distance between us and other near galaxies is so great that by the time we would receive their message, their message would already be at least eight years old.


7. There are many things in space that can stop block the signal or change the signals direction like other planets, asteroids, or anything else.


8. Because NASA sent a message via radio waves and we have yet to receive a response, I do not belive that there are any extraterrestrial civilizations that are currently able to reply in our galaxy.


9. Another reason that interstellar communication is difficult is because we are not sure where to send the signal. We could be sending the signal to the wrong location that does not have extraterrestrial technical civilizations.


10. I hope that someday we do make contact with a technical extraterrestrial civilization, but only when the people on earth are truly ready.


11. We can only hope that they would decipher the message in the same way we intended, to believe that they would understand our message is foolish and highly unlikely.


12. Most likely their language will not be English, but perhaps a dead language from early beginnings of civilization here on Earth.


13. Researchers have received signals of words and other sounds that they have attempted to decode.


14. If there are other intelligent life forms out there I think they would also want to be in contact with us to find out the same answer to our question of their existence.