...and turns out to be packing heat? Stephen Hawking is worried. Seth Shostak isn't.

Any society with the capability to threaten Earth is overwhelmingly likely to already have the kit required to pick up the leakage we’ve been wafting skyward for seven decades. The requisite radio technology is far easier than the necessary rocket technology.

And since we’ve been busy for a lifetime filling the seas of space with bottled messages marking our existence and position, it’s a bit silly to fret about new bottles.

So should we worry about a future, deliberate transmission to the stars? NASA doesn’t seem concerned: in 2008, it broadcast a Beatles song in the direction of the north star. It will take four centuries to get there.

Well, as long as it wasn't "Helter Skelter," we're cool, I guess. Let's be grateful they didn't go for Barry Manilow, or our distant progeny might be looking at at a heavily-armed environmental remediation fleet from Polaris in about eight hundred years.

cordially,