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WHAT HAPPENS IF WE EVER DETECT A SIGNAL FROM EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE? 

- DR STUART CLARK

It all seems so simple in the movies. An astronomer - often a maverick - is sitting alone in a radio telescope's control room when a strange signal comes across the speakers. Somehow, the astronomer knows instantly that it's from another world and, a few computer clicks later, the message is decoded and the plot begins to unfold.

But how easy would it be to understand what an extraterrestrial civilisation is saying to us in real life? With a renewed interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) sweeping across the world, that's the question increasingly being discussed by linguists and other scientists.

"I'm optimistic. I'm quite certain that there's no point in sending a signal that you don't want to be understood. So it'll be understandable," says Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of linguistics at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, and a board member of the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) organization

However, that doesn't mean it'll be easy to understand. Without direct access to the beings who wrote the message, it could take years, decades or centuries for us to decode the message. Or we may never decode it all. And here's where things truly take a turn. Based on some researchers' thinking, it may be that never decoding the signal is the best, safest option because we'll have no way of knowing what such a message contains.

It's easy to assume that a message would be benign, perhaps supplying us with information to shortcut centuries of scientific investigation, but some experts now think that the message might have a darker - even dangerous - intention. If so, is our quest to answer the question of are we alone, a case of being careful what we wish for?

A REALISTIC POSSIBILITY