Attempts to make first contact with extraterrestrial civilisations - if there are even any out there - have been questioned and labelled as “a postcard saying ‘Wish you were here.'”
As reported by The Byte, last month a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published ideas for an updated memo to broadcast to potential aliens.
However, some experts believe it is a mistake to draw attention to our galactic location.
Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), told the The Telegraph that sending out a message “has such a high impact that you actually need to take it rather seriously.”
For more of the news you care about, straight to your inbox, sign up for one of our daily newsletters here.
Sandberg likened such a message to “a postcard saying ‘Wish you were here.'” Speaking with The Telegraph, he said: "The poor aliens might already be getting various messages sent for all sorts of reasons."
Sandberg and his colleagues are calling for public discussions before broadcasting our location to any extraterrestrial civilizations that may be listening in.
“These dangers are small, but poorly understood and not yet well managed,” Sandberg’s colleague at the FHI Toby Ord wrote in a 2020 book called 'The Precipice' on the topic.
“The main relevant question is the ratio of peaceful to hostile civilisations,” Ord wrote, as quoted by The Telegraph. “We have very little evidence about whether this is high or low, and there is no scientific consensus.”
“Given the downside could be much bigger than the upside, this doesn’t sound to me like a good situation in which to take active steps toward contact,” he argued.
It comes after new research shows that aliens may be living in the icy shell of Jupiter's tiny moon Europa.
Comparisons have been made between this frigid world and Greenland, famously home to weird jellyfish, slugs, shrimps and snails.
Scientists believe that life could have evolved in shallow pockets of water near the surface of Europa following an analysis of symmetrical landforms called double ridges which stretch for hundreds of miles.
Ice-penetrating radar observations captured the formation of the same type of geometrical feature in northwest Greenland.
It is compelling evidence of potentially habitable environments.
Senior author Professor Dustin Schroeder, of the University of Stanford, California, said: "Because it is closer to the surface, where you get interesting chemicals from space, other moons and the volcanoes of Io, there is a possibility life has a shot if there are pockets of water in the shell.
"If the mechanism we see in Greenland is how these things happen on Europa, it suggests there is water everywhere."
