John Hertz, former chairman of the board of trustees of the US-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, which searches for signals of hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence, worried about China's participation in the project of the same name, as well as the METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program, which suggests sending signals to possible alien civilizations. A dedicated publication is available in the arXiv.org electronic preprint library and is accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
According to Hertz, sending signals to alien civilizations, if they exist, can be dangerous to humanity. China's participation in this activity has caused particular concern for the former chairman of the board of trustees of the SETI Institute, primarily due to the possibility of detecting the PRC signals from alien civilizations and the prospects for further disclosure of the information received by the country to the international community.
The expert was especially concerned about the commissioning of FAST (Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope), the world's largest filled aperture radio telescope. The PRC has already announced that the observatory will take part in the Breakthrough Listen project, which involves the search for alien civilizations.
Hertz proposes to regulate METI and its interaction with SETI at the legislative level. The expert also proposes to limit the power of the planet's largest radio transmitters, to which he attributed the Arecibo Observatory (Puerto Rico), the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex (California) and the 40th Separate Command and Measurement Complex (Crimea). In addition to Hertz, businessman Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking have previously expressed their concerns about METI.