Time for a proactive approach.

Once upon a time some very smart people decided it was all well and good to listen for alien radio transmissions but what we really needed to do was send out a message of our own. On November 16, 1974 the Arecibo Interstellar Message was sent from (you guessed it) the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. You may even have seen the visual representation of this message. It consisted of a grid, 73 X 23, two prime numbers so that if the aliens fiddled with it a bit they'd find that grid was the only way the message came out even and made a coherent picture. It contained a remarkable amount of information -- a number system, the chemical description of several elements most common here on Earth, DNA, a representation of our solar system, and representations of a humanoid life form and the radiotelescope transmitting the message. If you got on Yahoo or Google I'm sure you could find it on the net. It went out almost 30 years ago now. We haven't got an answer yet. Or at least no verifiable answer.

Now pardon me as I switch gears here. There is a theory that one way that an alien species may be trying to search for or contact other aliens (meaning us) is via a network of some sort of vessels containing a message or an archive of their knowledge. They themselves may not have the technology to go in person to the places they want to search. The distances may be too great, just as with us. Instead of a single mission or a single observatory, they send out a fleet of possibly unmanned probes in all directions. Each one is programmed to send a signal back if it encounters something intelligent -- if its captors manage to open it up or communicate with it, perhaps.

Now switch gears again, and think of Pioneers 10 and 11, and Voyager, all on their way out of our system.

So here's what I think we could do.

Build a small probe -- it could be one of the new little satellite kind, they're only about the size of a washing machine. Give it an ion drive. Give it a radio dish and a transmitter. On the outside of the probe, inscribe at least one of the hull panels with a series of dots representing the numbers 1 thru 9, the basic 2 dimensional geometric shapes (point, line, circle, triangle, square, etc.) and a representation of the solar system. But instead of making the solar system just a series of dots with one out of line representing Earth, make each planet a circle equivalent to the relative size of the planet within the system. Inside the one representing the sun, put a color version of the spectrographic signature of the sun. Each of these spectra are unique to the individual star. Set the radio transmitter to continually transmit some kind of unique pattern of simple beeps. You send this little thing out, point it out into the universe, turn on the ion drive and let it go until it runs out of krypton. Thereafter it flies off into interstellar space.

Okay so what will this accomplish? One, the thing would obviously have been made by a highly intelligent species. The mathematical knowledge represented by the numbers and the geometric shapes would show that, not to mention the fact they're inscribed on the side of a robotic spacecraft. The radio transmitter and receiver shows we know radio and could probably take an answer in that form. The spectrographic signature will tell them exactly which star the probe came from. We send out several of these in several directions. The beeping transmitter will call attention to the probe and allow any spacefaring aliens to find it easily. It says we're intelligent, we know math, we know how to build spacecraft, and come on in the water's fine.

Make them cheaply with off-the-shelf stuff, make a dozen of them, and launch them on the smaller rockets used for commercial satellites. Deltas or something. Maybe put a camera or other kinds of science tools on board to make it of more than just SETI interest. Like the Pioneers and Voyager, these things will be travelling a long time after we're gone. The more of them out there, the greater the odds at least one will be picked up by an alien species. These things are meant to out into the universe and they're meant to draw attention to themselves and us. What good is it to simply sit here listening to the universe? With the ion drive's constant acceleration, the probes would be travelling at some significant speeds when they left the system. And they'd keep going at that velocity, out into the great wide open.

Some people say the aliens haven't contacted us because they don't know we're here. Some people say we shouldn't draw attention to ourselves, that anything that could pick up our radio and TV signals and get here in a reasonable timeframe would inevitably be bad news for us. I think if we're ever going to take our place in the universe we need to do something like this. They're not going to come to us until they've figured out there's something here worth talking to.

Well, anyway, I'm getting tired now so I'm off to bed.