The mission of the Invitation to ETI is to establish communication with any form of extraterrestrial intelligence able to monitor our World Wide Web.
Rationale
SETI science applies a rigorous approach to the search for credible, verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This Invitation to ETI is a large-scale SETI project, involving approximately 100 people around the world in an unconventional, but equally rigorous, search modality.
SETI scientists generally agree that any alien civilization we detect will likely be much older than human civilization. Prof. Ray Norris calculates that it will likely be about a billion years older - certainly at least one million. (He estimates the odds that it will be younger than this at about 1000 to 1.) This means that the science, technology, philosophy, goals, values, and ethics of some extraterrestrial civilizations will have had a million years to develop, whereas ours have had only a few thousand. We hypothesize civilizations that, during this million-year period, will have developed smart small robotic probes (or some other means) for studying our civilization, including its global computer network, the World Wide Web.
