Letters

ET, stay home
Your excellent editorial in the April 24 issue of Science News (“An intelligent ET would probably just stay home”) explained the most obvious reasons for the unlikelihood of an extraterrestrial message, let alone visitors.

Additional obstacles worth mention are 1) the gigantic retro-rockets, parachutes and heat shields required for braking a super-speeding vehicle, and 2) the galactic power needed for aligning the astronomical egos of spaceship builders, launchers and captains.
Curtis L. Brown, Neenah, Wis.

Reading Tom Siegfried’s column on extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations raised an immediate question: Since it is highly likely that older societies with vastly more advanced technologies exist and also likely that these societies use means other than the electromagnetic spectrum for interstellar communication, it seems also likely that extraterrestrials would know that a society like us, with our primitive technology, would use that spectrum.