Thirty five years ago, a gold-plated record was lofted into the cosmos with a greeting card for the first extraterrestrials who found it. The golden plaque, attached to the Voyager spacecraft, was etched with a medley of Earth sounds, from a baby’s cry to musical selections ranging from a Bach fugue to Chuck Berry’s upbeat “Johnny B. Goode.” Not long after the probe was launched, a psychic played by Steve Martin on “Saturday Night Live” revealed that aliens had promptly delivered this urgent four-word response: “Send more Chuck Berry.”
The news last week that a concerted scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence by the SETI Institute in California has resumed raises fundamental questions: If we made contact, what would we say? And what answers would we anticipate?
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