Who Should Speak For Earth?

The ongoing attempt to find signals from extraterrestrial civilizations raises an interesting set of questions. If we find such a signal, what, if anything, should we do? If we decide to put a message on the same wavelength that carried the alien signal to us, for example, what should our message say, and who should decide? Who should speak for Earth?

Government protocols exist laying out what should happen if a likely alien signal is detected, but once the news got out, the event would obviously become a matter of political judgment. In that situation, should the Secretary General of the United Nations speak for mankind? Should the President of the United States, as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth? Should a committee speak for us, and if so, who decides who's on the committee? Will the people in direct control of the largest radio telescope complexes in the world become the most powerful people on Earth in this matter, because they would be able to send whatever message they wanted?

There is a school of thought that argues we should not reply so as not to give away the fact of our existence, by the way, but our broadcasts over the past eighty years or so have been leaking into space and already reached more than a few stars. That cat may already be out of the bag.

If we send a message, what should it say? Likely, that won't matter, because the alien at the other end won't understand human languages, anyway. Still, on the theory that an alien civilization might exhaustively analyze such a signal-- as we would-- we may want to send something suitably complex and internally coherent, to suggest we were capable of some fairly fancy thinking. The mathematical derivation of Einstein's theory of relativity, perhaps. Or maybe one of our grandest symphonies. After sending our message, the hard part would be waiting years or decades for a response.