Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
A very noble endeavour indeed, but I still don't get it.<p>So let's say that by examining the petabytes of data that's received from the telescopes, at some point a signal is detected.<p>Let's say that somehow all the competing scientests and skeptics, religious and opinion leaders magically and peacefully agree: the signal is from an inteligent life form. 
Somewhere close, just a couple of hundred light years away ...<p>Then what ?<p>Do we build rockets to travel there ? Do we 'tune-in' and decipher the signal ? Do we send them our own signals in the hope that they are listening ?