I found an article that made me laugh today, though, entitled "Stingy aliens may call us on cheap rates only"
Considering that aliens are normally presented like this...
(don't ask, that's the first picture that came up when I googled "alien".)
... it's quite difficult to imagine them having qualities like being frugal or neurotic. But all of the unknown signals that scientists have ever seen have only ever lasted around 10 seconds and then were never seen again:
"Frugal aliens would swing a pulsed microwave beam across the disc of the Milky Way, where most of our galaxy's stars reside. "They wouldn't want to target individual stars: there are far too many of them," he says. "Instead, they'd build a powerful beacon, then swing that beacon around and repeat it.
"If aliens did follow that strategy, their signals would not repeat for many months. "Astronomers have seen some unexplained signals that lasted for tens of seconds then were never seen again," says Benford. "Some of those could have been extraterrestrial beacons but there wasn't enough observing time to wait for any repeats."
Chances are, the title of the article was coined to attract attention, but I'll still point out that I think it's incredibly presumptuous and somewhat shallow of us to assume that aliens would have our characteristics. If our characteristics and ethics are a by-product of evolution, then these extraterrestrials would have had to have gone through a similar evolutionary process to us... unless, that is, there are underlying themes in evolutionary and survival ethics, no matter what path the creatures took to reach to their present state. But, of course, we haven't a clue.
