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52 which direction to send. It would be far too expensive to construct enough radio telescopes to bathe the sky in detectable signals.”'* The future may be different. As our technology improves, the balance tilts in favor of transmitting for two reasons: The Earth will produce less leakage, and transmitting becomes easier and less expensive as time goes on. However, any active transmission strategy would have to be long-lived."* Within 100 years, MacGowan and Ordway predicted, humans may be willing to undertake a more or less permanent transmitting program to selected stars. Until then, we must be content with planning on serious, extensive, and selective listening.® The SETI Institute’s Douglas Vakoch and others have argued that “active SETI” is an alternative search strategy that may increase our pros- pects for success in finding other civilizations. Vakoch added that it would provide more opportunity for funding by appealing to a new group of potential supporters and by emphasizing that at least one civilization is transmitting messages.'° Even if an extrasolar society does receive our messages, there is no assur- ance that it would be willing to acknowledge them. We can only hope, observed MacGowan and Ordway, that our signals will inspire worlds more advanced than ours to reveal themselves to us in a manner within our powers of comprehension.” Goldsmith raised the possibility that we may have to compete for the privilege of getting detailed messages from extraterrestrials. Our most competitive strategy may be actively transmitting messages that are suffi- ciently intriguing to capture the interest of others.'® Private organizations and commercial enterprises already have sent their own signals. Canadian astronomer Yvan Dutil and physicist Stephane Dumas created a pictographic message that was transmitted in 1999 to four nearby Sun-like stars, with the support of a U.S.-based organization called Project Encounter. That group’s Cosmic Call 2003 sent signals from a 230-foot Ukrainian radio telescope to five selected stars. According to the Project Encounter organization, such a call is important because its members “believe that we must do everything we can to try to make First Contact” and because humanity stands to gain much beneficial knowledge. The Command Center for this Cosmic Call was in the UFO Museum and Research Center at Roswell, New Mexico.'” Sending Our Own Signals Is This Research? Transmission is a diplomatic act, an activity that should be undertaken on ee eee behalf of all humans. —The SETI 2020 Report, 2002