Doug Vakoch

He had a documentary and he posed this provocative issue of, you know, if the aliens transmit, don't respond.

Because, you know, when we've seen contact between civilizations here on Earth, it often does not work well for the less advanced civilization.

So, you know, duck and cover.

But Doug was like, okay, look, the aliens know we're here.

I mean, anyone with a technology, a SETI system a little bit more advanced than us can already pick up our leakage radiation.

The cat's out of the bag.

For messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.

Is there an analogy?

I think they're siblings with quite different interests.

I mean, generally shared interests.

You know, we value science.

We want to be doing these kind of things.

But, you know, each of the kids has its own thing that they think is the most important thing in the world.

We may never get the other one to agree with us, but it's okay.

So some of them are very heavily based on math and send them in the form of a picture.

Or some have said, oh, what we really want to do is we want to be able to engage.

And we can't do that because of all these distances.

Let's send an AI, send a computer program that once they have built it on the other end, they can actually interact with it and they'll be able to engage with it even at a distance.

Right.

Others have said, send something like music.