Reaching out to distant worlds; how do we respond when E.T. phones? Scientists are drafting a message to be sure humans make a good first impression.

• Author: Overbye, Dennis
• Position: Science times

THERE IS PROBABLY ONLY ONE PERSON on Earth--although, one hopes, not in the universe whose business card identifies him as "Interstellar Message Group Leader."

That would be Douglas Vakoch, resident psychologist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. It is his job to come up with ideas for a response in case any searchers ever discern, amid the crackle and hiss of radio waves from outer space, the equivalent of "Hi there what's your name?"

The receipt of a signal from another civilization, astronomers involved in SETI say, would be one of the greatest events in the history of humanity. The question of how or whether to respond, they say, is too important to be left to the last minute.

"The initial message we send, if we ever do send any, would create the first impression for what would be a dialogue that would be occurring over many generations," Vakoch says.

In the interest of making a good impression--and perhaps counteracting the burble of Friends, automobile ads, and political news spreading outward through the galaxy on radio and television waves--Vakoch is devising a message that encodes the notion of altruism, the charitable quality that many biologists and humanists would like to think is a pillar of any civilization.

It is an effort, he says, that will have value even if there is nothing but silence from the heavens. "By thinking about how we would want to represent ourselves, we're forced to reflect in a different way than we usually do about what our deepest values are," Vakoch says.

THE GALACTIC RADIO

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has proceeded in fits and starts ever since 1959, when two Cornell University physicists, Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi, suggested that extraterrestrial civilizations would find it easier and cheaper to reach across the galaxy with radio waves than to visit in person.

The SETI Institute is now halfway through a survey of 1,000 nearby sunlike stars, Project Phoenix--so named because it rose from the ashes of a NASA-sponsored program that was canceled in 1993. The institute's astronomers are already laying plans for another search with new radio telescopes, which will extend the survey to some 30,000 stars. By comparison, there are roughly 400 billion stars in Earth's Milky Way galaxy, but the search technology increases with each improvement in computer-chip technology.

In April 1989, the trustees of the International Academy of...