The True Story of a 1967 “Contact” Incident | MIT Technology Review: " . . . . Soon afterwards, she found a second source of signals and by mid-January, a third and fourth source. By this time, the team discounted the possibility that an artificial source could be responsible and eventually settled on neutron stars as the explanation. In February, the paper announcing the discovery was accepted and published in Nature following a public announcement on 24 February 1968. Penny says that what’s interesting about this process is that during the discovery process, the team discussed the implications should the signal turn out to be an artificial source, how to verify such a conclusion and how to announce it. They also discussed whether such a discovery might be dangerous. This process closely follows the Detection Protocol agreed by the international community in 1990. There’s an interesting corollary to this. The team also discussed the possibility that if it were an artificial source, somebody would want to reply. Penny points out that the international community has yet to agree on a Reply Protocol because there are widely differing views on whether such a course of action would be beneficial or dangerous for humanity. This is a situation that needs to be rectified. “The 1967 episode indicates how difficult it would be to construct a policy in the fervid atmosphere of a ‘Contact’,” says Penny. With SETI searches now focusing on habitable exoplants around other stars, it seems prudent to come to some agreement sooner rather than later. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1302.0641: The SETI Episode in the 1967 Discovery of Pulsars (read more at links above)
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