> Carl Sagan used to talk about the pride that New Guinea natives might have
> felt when they first instituted a series of drum stations on every
> mountaintop in New Guinea. One fellow would hear
> "baboomp-ah-baboomp-bahoomp-ah" and repeat it the next station by his
> drumming "baboomp-ah-baboomp-bahoomp-ah" as a perfect repeat of the
received
> message, and by doing so, in just a day, the message would be transmitted
> from one end of the island to the other, a distance that would have
otherwise
> taken two months to walk.
>
> Because of this extraordinary technological advance in repeating drums,
New
> Guineans would have every reason to be proud of this nation-building
> capacity. Communications is the quality that links people together into a
> cohesive unit, and the brightest and the best of them would know that.
>
> Nonetheless, at exactly the same time the New Guineans are cutting ribbons
> and holding local press conferences extolling the virtues of the new drum
> relay system, international radio traffic could be going over them, around
> them and actually through them, and they would never have a clue of its
> existence.
>
> Our use of radio is the same thing. We are justly proud of our
> accomplishments with radio technology, but we could be in the midst of
> enormous interstellar communications web, using some equivalently unknown
> methodology, and we would never know it.
>
> So why do we use radio? The answer is simple: it's all we've got. And we
have
> start somewhere.
>
Besides, IF one were looking for other life as these ET's probably would and
they
heard "drum beats" (in this case, our radio waves), I am sure they would try
to
send us messages in kind.

Nick D.