Could a Beatles Song be a Threat to the Human Race?

So I read about it first over at Black Holes and Astrostuff, then on Universe Today, and even after that a few people were talking about it on the forums, so I thought that I would put in a word about the Beatles song being blasted across the galaxy. Well you may or may have not heard about this yet but NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) sent a transmission toward the North Star, Polaris. The transmission sent was the song "Across the Universe" by the Beatles and I guess was intended for any sufficiently advanced extra terrestrial life to listen to. Though what is being said now is that, not just this one transmission, but all of the radio and television leakage into the galaxy, along with info about position in the solar system and information about human biology on the Voyager and Pioneer probes we may just be giving away information that we wouldn't want possibly menacing aliens to have. Pretty much all of the scientific community agrees that an alien threat because of this is really zero, though many people think that we should discuss the issue globally before we move forward with transmitting messages into the cosmos. This discussion began at the SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) "Sound of Silence" meeting where scientists talked about the fact that in spite of 50 years of listening we haven't heard a single signal from ET. Some of the optimistic discussion of the meeting focused on the first of the 42 dishes of the Allen Telescope Array that began operation last year, which will be dedicated entirely to SETI. And the proposed Square Kilometer Array telescope will be sensitive enough to pick up signals such as alien TV and radio.

Where it started: Telegraph.co.uk

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