Invitation to ETI

Invitation to ETI invites Extra-Terrestrial intelligent entities to contact humans or “Earthlings” via the Internet. The 100 Signatories to the Invitation, consisting of physical, biological, and social scientists, as well as artists, authors, poets, musicians, and futurists, hope that autonomous alien space probes may be able to tap into the Internet and read our transmissions. Those who attempt this mode of contact feel theirs is a scientific project, a subset of SETI, and unlike UFOlogy.

Allen Tough, the founder of Invitation to ETI is a Canadian, and Professor Emeritus at the prestigious University of Toronto, where he specialized in adult learning and self-directed change. In 1981 Professor Tough influenced by Harlow Shapley moved into the field of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence scientifically SETI. He also developed an new interest in the future of human civilization in the long term and in finding what he saw as the search for meaning for individuals for society and on a cosmic level.

"Sooner or later, unless we extinguish ourselves first, advanced extraterrestrials will have an enormous impact on humankind. Even during the next 30 years, the probability of contact of interaction may be one in four. (Allen Tough writing in 1986)"

It has not happened yet, and now ,in the 21st Century, scientists would probably be far more cautious before assigning a probability to alien contact. Allen Tough and Invitation to ETI principal investigator H. Paul Shuch believe that benevolent extraterrestrials could have immense positive impact on humanity. They are hopeful that aliens will want to help us, and believe that malevolent aliens who want to invade Earth could already easily have done so. Allen Tough believes that aliens are letting us develop freely to find out how we do it. See Gombe Stream National Park. The aliens may or may not want to prevent nuclear war but could prevent it if they want to. He believes that alien civilizations will almost certainly be thousands or millions of years older than we are. Human civilization has changed enormously during the 10,000 years that it has existed and alien civilization will be immeasurably further advanced. What they can give us will be so far advanced that it will seem like magic to us.