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272 The major exception would be unusually powerful beamed signals, such as the one sent from Arecibo in 1974. Even those might fail the test of repeatability. An alien astronomer may have written the equivalent of Wow! beside a spike on his recording device, without ever finding us again. There may be a critical density of civilizations necessary to allow round- trip travel of radio signals, suggested Bracewell. If that density is reached, there may be enough communication to sustain a Galactic Club. If it is not reached, there may be no communication between civilizations.™* We postulate that interstellar communication, having spread rapidly throughout the Galaxy once it began, is now a reality for countless races. —Project Cyclops, 1972*° It’s not going to waste its time talking to gibbering idiots. —Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud, 1957°° Many SETI researchers expect that, at a certain level of development, technological civilizations will intentionally transmit signals for detection by others. SETI astronomer Paul Horowitz reflected the optimistic impli- cations of this assumption: “If they’re attempting to contact other civiliza- tions, we’ll succeed some day.”*” Others have questioned assumptions underlying this scenario: that intel- ligent extraterrestrials would intentionally beam radio signals toward us; that those signals would be antiencrypted through the use of universal mathematical and scientific truths; that once these are translated, they would provide a Rosetta Stone for communication in other domains. These assumptions, critics maintain, betray a high degree of anthropocentrism.™* We cannot assume that extraterrestrial civilizations are eager to commu- nicate with us, nor that all human beings are eager to communicate with them. “Cosmology texts of the sixties were written with a kind of naive opti- mism,” commented anthropologist Anthony Aveni, “that imagined not only rampant chemical and biological systems just like ours but an inter- galactic intelligentsia with the same cultural expansiveness, natural curios- ity, and desire to explore—for the sake of acquiring knowledge itself—that Earth-based ethnocentric theorizers possessed.” To believe that there are societies elsewhere bent upon and capable of communicating with us is not only to be anthropomorphic, Beck cautioned, it is to believe that civiliza- tions elsewhere are like one civilization that has existed on only a small portion of this Earth for only a few hundred years.” Rood and Trefil saw no reason to expect that the human desire to learn about others and to let others know about us is a universal trait. Shostak Before Contact They Want to Communicate