What do we do if SETI is successful?

> Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) called the practice of METI “deeply unwise and immature,” and recommended that “the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

What's the original source for this Sagan quote?

> carl sagan called METI “deeply unwise and immature"

It's repeated ad nauseum online, but always verbatim, just those few words and never a full passage, and never with a citation. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of an apocryphal quote or misattribution.

The reason I'm suspicious is because Sagan contributed to the Aricebo message[1], which is literally sending such a radio signal, and the the Voyager disc[2], which is similar. He even wrote an entire sci-fi novel[3] about it.

He describes radio contact in generally positive and hopeful terms in his book Cosmos. He of course acknowledges the dangers of encountering a more technologically advanced civilization, but he goes out of his way to contrast the frightening example of the Aztecs with other more peaceful first encounters such as the Tlingit. He also argues that any significantly more advanced species that had survived millions of years would necessarily have achieved zero population growth and would likely be peaceful. You don't have to take my word for it, you can read his own words in the Encyclopedia Galactica chapter of his book on the Internet Archive[4].

So, if the quote you cited was true, it would represent a late-in-life and somewhat surprising change of heart from cautious optimism to "dark forest" style paranoia. Personally, I believe it's simply one of the many falsely attributes quotes floating around the Internet.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)

[4]: https://archive.org/details/sagancosmos/page/n184/mode/1up

Carl Sagan doxxed the Earth with the Voyager disk.

As far as I can tell the quote comes from Science 2.0's site [0], and is frequently quoted somewhat verbatim in other places like reddit, quora and articles. But I can't really find the original (Carl Sagan) source.

[0]: https://www.science20.com/brinstorming/meti_should_we_be_sho...

It will take tens of thousands of years for Voyagers to reach only the nearest stars, so I don't think that disk is really a problem. Any alien civilisation that could reaches the probes in the near future will already know about us or will find out soon after anyway even without the information on that disk.

The probe (and disc) are infintesmally small in the grand scheme of things, if there's anything that would reveal the position of Earth it's our own signal emissions, which are well ahead of the Voyager probes (the first radio signals are now ~125 light years away. No idea if they can still be detected among background radiation though)

I was curious about this and got some interesting insights from GPT-5 if anyone's curious:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68f8ed38-876c-800e-8df2-01c29890f3...

There's a joke about a speeding BMW that crashes into the back of a hay cart. The driver complains that the cart should had a red rag to signal its presence. The carter responds "you didn't see the cart, would have you seen the rag?"

The info in Voyager is just a vanity plate... or a time capsule. Nothing wrong with that anyway. Some time in the future, humans will locate it and put it back in a museum.

I notice that there's not a single reference in that entire response. How do you know which parts of it are hallucinated and which aren't?