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311 advanced technological societies, we cannot be exploited or enslaved.... they are too far away to pose a threat. Deanle ~ 1009157 The radar and television announcement of an emerging technical society on Earth may induce a rapid response by nearby civilizations, newly moti- vated to reach our system directly. —Carl Sagan and William Newman, 1981'** In the remote contact scenario, the impact of contact could be positive, negative, or both. Whatever the cultural consequences of such indirect contact might be, we might feel insulated from danger by distance. Bernard Oliver, who believed that interstellar flight was effectively impossible, dismissed the idea that “you should keep quiet in the jungle.”!”” Yet, as we saw earlier, no law of physics or engineering forbids interstellar travel. The principal issue for a more technologically advanced species would be whether there was sufficient motivation to invest the necessary resources. Detecting us might provoke a better-equipped species to send out inter- stellar probes, at least to look us over. Remote contact could lead to direct contact. Shklovskii and Sagan put this in quasi-diplomatic terms. “If interstellar spaceflight by advanced technical civilizations is commonplace, we may expect an emissary, perhaps in the next several hundred years.” A report to the U.S. Congress gave that possibility a more ominous tone. “The receiving civilization might be capable of interstellar flight and dispatch emissaries for further investigation. With no foreknowledge of their char- acter, we might be aiding in our own doom.”'” Mind-Stretcher. The arrival of a robot interstellar probe from one civili- zation might lead the other to feel the necessity of developing an interstel- lar travel capability, suggested the Clarks. This might play a role in a snowballing accumulation of intelligences with interstellar mobility.’ We could look on this as a parallel to the assumed spread of interstellar tanatonn The distance to be traversed depends heavily on the assumptions one makes. Asimov, assuming a uniform distribution of currently existing civi- lizations in our Galaxy, estimated that the average distance between them may be as little as 40 light-years. Ulmschneider, assuming a lower number of civilizations existing at one time, estimated an average separation of about 1700 light-years.' All estimates of distance between technological civilizations are suspect. The assumption of uniform distribution may be faulty, as some parts of the Galaxy may be much more hospitable to the evolution of intelligence than Distance Protects Us —Frank Drake, 1992!’ communications.