The idea of an interstellar WWW is an idea worth exploring. If they are transversing the stars or their galactic neighborhood, they would need a way to communicate with each other over the vastness of space.

For those demanding a definite answer to 'Are we alone', it can not be answered right now. Will it? most definitely so. I, for one, am positive that there are others out there. I think of every star as a possibility for intelligent life or just some form of life. There are more stars in the universe then there are grains of sand on every beach on Earth. So the chances are high. Finding them is the trick.

Space is vast, unimaginably large, one could say infinite. transversing those distances is not at all an easy task.

As for Jeremiah , Anthony and Sherri and their 2012 nonsense, there is little to no truth in man made tales or prophecies. Ancient prophecies are just that, old tales that add up to nothing.

Reason and logic will always trump fairy tales.

We read your page and were not real impressed considering you did not consider ALL the evidence! You simply dismissed out of hand all the Ancient Prophecies..How about those Sumerians..no answer for the cuniform eh or all the many predictions all over this planet that date back many thousands of years ago….all the evidence taken together makes a strong case for Earth Changes, even if you feel that PLanet X will not cause them..So Prepare anyway!!! The Conspiracy is in the theory, and there are a lot of those floating around…The best test will be time..only a few years now…

Peac e and Love
Jeremiah , Anthony and Sherri

Personally, I want to know if there are aliens out there. Whether or not they are broadcasting to us or if we just so happen to travel into the vicinity of their broadcast, it doesn't matter to me. It would be the biggest discovery in our history.

Should we receive a signal, what should we do? Should we attempt to answer? I know the signal would be analyzed to the fullest degree to decipher it's meaning and origin. For all we know, it could be a cry for help as some far away civilization is under attack from years and years ago. Who knows, maybe it won't be an old message. They could have technology that would allow them to send a message in a fraction of time compared to what we could do.

I hope we can find out, undoubtedly, one way or another, whether or not we are truly alone. I hope it's in my lifetime.

Still, unless there's something very subtle in there, it seems to me that modulating a star's output would mean INSANELY slow bit rates that would make extremely low frequency submarine communications look like broadband…

This has to be the daftest idea I've seen this year. I agree with Chuck, some ideas are just too dumb – even for Star Trek.

Totally agree with Chuck.

There should be better peer review to avoid funding wacky research.

Eat 100 razors. May not get the results you are looking for, but you'll learn whether or not your body can take it. If it can, then we can do more research to figure out what further use we get from it. Never know, it may be the cure for cancer!

Huge difference between this and inventing something within your grasp and technology.

When it comes to taxpayer money, and public perception… considerations must be made on how it is spent.

Yes, it is possible to waste time and money on science. If every scientist conducted research without thought to proper use of resources, we quickly will find ourselves without funding and support.

…idiot.

Science is never a waste of time.

It may not pay off with the results you were hoping for, but that in itself is a reward. You've conclusively proved one more way not to find alien intelligences.

When Thomas Edison was asked whether he got frustrated when he failed to produce a working lightbulb over 100 times, he said:

"I didn't fail. I found 100 ways how I could go about not making a lightbulb."

Lets take a bunch of references (some of our own previous work…so we get a bit more noticed), use some common parts from each, interject something else for good measure, smoke some wild Hawaiian plants, come up with some silly idea from it all and then get away with it by claiming, "…a sufficiently advanced civilzation can do this!"

Why not go for broke in the fact they would be able to change the color along with it? I mean really… if they were so advanced.

If you would like to drop them a line. Ask them if they lost some sort of bet:

John Learned: jgl@phys.hawaii.edu
R-P. Kudritzki: kud@ifa.hawaii.edu
Sandip Pakvasa: pakvasa@phys.hawaii.edu
A. Zee: zee@kitp.ucsb.edu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A#Neutrino_emissions

By "tickling" the star, with the delivery of a relatively small amount of energy via neutrinos or other forms of power pulses at the right time could trigger the Cepheid to a specific variability, and a message could be encoded within that variability.

Would these be the same neutrinos that we can barely detect at the moment even when we do our damnedest to make intensive 'beams' of them? The selfsame neutrinos of which we detected a grand total of TWENTY-FOUR (counting antis two) when we observed a bloody SUPERNOVA?

Yush … piece of cake.

Why should anyone or anything try to contact us? We'd either want to attack it because it was different or posed an imminent threat just because it reached out or run and hide because we were too feeble to understand it's message. We aren't very far from the early homo-sapiens, people. We still have our animalistic moments. Not very trustworthy or intelligent when you think about it.

We are a smart species, don't get me wrong. But when people my age (26) or of other age groups kill eachother and beat eachother up for "offenses" equal to looking at them with a face showing something other than blank emotion or something as trivial as spoken words against or different from their religion, it doesn't really act as a beacon for intelligent life. It's more like "We've found insecure multi-celled organisms. Hmm, better keep going."