if you wanted to ban people transmitting signals how would you enforce that ban?

those russian guys have done a few transmissions already. They intend to do alot more. Whos going to stop them?

Heres another dilema, we know we face a real threat from giant space rocks periodically hitting earth. We have some small NEO (near earth object) programs going on at the moment. But really theyre quite useless if the "big one" comes along becuase by the time we see it it will be too late.

We need more powerfull radars to detect these objects further out. But these radars say the size of Aceribo would be powerfull enough for alien civs to detect thousands of light years away.

So do we not run NEO programs in the fear it may attract the borg?

Very interesting. This thread has really got me thinking. Just consider the human race from an objective perspective. Assuming that the Earth is a living organism itself, then in order for it to stay healthy every creature on it must have either a positive or neutral effect on it . We as humans, advanced though we believe ourselves to be, have only a negative impact. If the Earth is a living organism then we are a disease. When any creature contracts a disease, one of two possible outcomes can occur. The host will either fight the disease off, or die. For us this means that in order to survive we must either stop attacking our planet or we will have to leave her behind (or die with her!). And nobody knows how many, if any suitable alternatives exist. One might assume that there are a great many billions, but whether any of them are close enough to be of any use to us and whether we will ever become technologically advanced enough to ever take advantage of any of them is pure conjecture. Any race advanced enough to be capable of FTL travel may be billions of years older than us and view us as a glitch in the development of life in our solar system that could very well see the end of it.

From the other side however, they may have long ago reached this crucial 'tipping point' themselves and seek to help us through it. This said I personally believe that the former is a more likely scenario and that any race capable of mastering interstellar, intergalactic or indeed interuniversal (have I just coined a new phrase?!) travel could not possibly have been as warlike as ourselves without at some point self destructing.

As a result of this I would imagine most if not all truly advanced civilisations would view us as little more than an intermediary species, interesting to study but greatly less successful in survival terms than pretty much every other creature ever to have evolved.

To quote a comment from another user that I read recently on ATS,

'If I was in the garden and saw a mosquito buzzing around me, my first instinct would not be to exchange technology with it.'

What if an Alien species sees Earth the way the American Government saw Iraq and decided to do to Earth what America did to Iraq.

I think this move to increase our visibility a number of times over is a little hasty.

Another "What if?", extraterrestrials may chose not to come here and instead establish communications with the sole intent to use psychological manipulation to severely retard our civilisation.
Why? Well, it's common to hear the opinion that we are incredibly less advanced than what we would likely find 'out there', but what if we're only a little less advanced. What if we're only a several major discoveries away from being able to build space craft capable of travelling 60-80% of the speed of light and constructed to withstand the ravages of deep space? Maybe we might only be 70, 50 or perhaps only 30 years away from such achievements. Our society now possesses the capability to whip out all human life on this planet, imagine if we had the ability to extend that capability to other planets? We have some pretty spooky weapons tech at our disposal now. Perhaps we're more technologically advanced, when compared to alien societies, than we give ourselves credit for.
Do we appear threatening from across the cosmos?

I never really liked this idea myself. You have no idea what is really out there or what their intentions are. Not all civilizations are going to be open and friendly. It just seems to me like we are setting ourselves up for disaster.