The follwoing is excerpted from an editorial that appeared in the Telegram & Gazette, Worcester, Mass.

There’s a heated debate in certain circles with potentially profound implications for the future of humanity. It revolves around a core existential question: Are we alone in the universe? And its logical outgrowth: Should we step out of the shadows to find out by beaming signals into the cosmos.

The issue is explored by Steven Johnson in the July 2 edition of The New York Times Magazine.

A figure as notable as Stephen Hawking is convinced we’re not alone. He has been warning against efforts to ramp up our interstellar calls, as it were, in hopes that E.T. will pick up the phone and answer. The fear is that actions we take today might doom humans hundreds or even thousands of years in the future in encountering alien visitors who might view us the way we view bacteria. Just consider the history of our own planet, replete with bad things that happened, even inadvertently, when more technologically advanced cultures encountered those less advanced.

It could be a benevolent E.T. But do we want to risk sending an electronic “yoo-hoo” to the Borg?

Until now, most of our efforts have involved passive listening for signs of extraterrestrial transmissions — radio waves captured by radio telescopes or laser flashes captured by optical telescopes. We haven’t experienced the sort of eureka moment portrayed in Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact” and the 1997 movie based on the book. At least, no eureka moment that we can confirm.

There are, however, 37 unexplained signals detected in a scan of the northern sky — outlined in a 1993 paper by Paul Horowitz and Carl Sagan in The Astrophysical Journal. These signals, which could not be detected in later observations, were first observed in Worcester County, at the Harvard University-Smithsonian radio telescope that once operated in the town of Harvard.

Professor Horowitz, a Harvard University researcher now retired but still active in the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, said in a telephone and email exchange this week that he views efforts to reach out to life elsewhere to be harmless, but also rather pointless. Because of the likely technological disparity, it would be akin to ants making little circles in the sand hoping we’d notice.

He counsels passive listening for now, until we get our footing on what’s out there, and have more to offer. And we agree