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FOR nearly 50 years, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has scanned the heavens for signs of alien life. At the same time, scientists have painstakingly crafted messages to send in reply. When NASA launched its Voyager missions in 1977, for example, both spacecraft carried audio recordings depicting the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

But those messages have never truly represented all of humanity. On 15 May that will change as the . As yet there are no plans to transmit these into space, but the project aims to get a discussion going about what kinds of message we should send and what we should say.

The standard wisdom in interstellar diplomacy is to avoid controversy. In the early 1970s NASA attached etched with basic mathematics, science and line drawings of a naked man and woman. Some people complained the agency was sending 鈥渟mut into space鈥�.

Later messages have avoided such criticism. One from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico depicts the human form in so few pixels that its sex is not clear. The Voyager recordings excluded war, poverty and disease.

However, messages to the stars should not shrink from the details. Might not an advanced extraterrestrial species, savvy in the ways of intelligent beings, notice that something was missing from our description of ourselves? An acknowledgment of our flaws and frailties seems a more honest approach than sending a sanitised, one-sided story. Honesty is a good starting point for a conversation that could last for generations.

If we continue to dodge controversy we risk sending messages that are both brief and boring. We sometimes clash in our beliefs and customs; we disagree over matters of taste and morality. In no small part this is what characterises us as a species. And it may just make us intriguing enough to the inhabitants of other worlds to elicit a reply.