“Even if the aliens are short, gloomy, and sexually obsessed,” the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once thought, “if they’re here, I want to know about them.”
Guided by the same mindset, a NASA-led team of international scientists has developed a new message that proposes to radiate across the galaxy in hopes of making first contact with intelligent aliens.
The interstellar message, known as the beacon in the galaxy, opens with simple principles of communication, some basic concepts in math and physics, DNA components, and ends with information about humans, Earth, and a return address if a distant recipient intends to respond.
The research team, led by Dr. Jonathan Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, says that with technical improvements, the binary message can be transmitted to the heart of the Milky Way by the Allen Telescope at the Seti Institute in California and the 500-meter Spherical radio telescope with aperture price China |
Researchers say the message could, with upgrades, be sent from China’s 500-meter spherical radio telescope. Photo: Xinhua / REX / Shutterstock
In a preliminary document not reviewed by partners, scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the center of the Milky Way, a region considered the most promising for life. “Humanity has, we say, a compelling story to share and a desire to know about others – and now there are means to do so,” the researchers wrote.
The message, if it ever leaves Earth, will not be the first. The lighthouse in the galaxy is based on a message from Arecibo sent in 1974 by an observatory of the same name in Puerto Rico. It’s aimed at a bunch of stars about 25,000 light-years away, so it won’t be coming soon. Since then, numerous announcements have been made to heaven, including an advertisement for Doritos and an invitation written in Klingon to the Klingon Opera in The Hague.
Such attempts at interstellar communication are not easy. The chances of an intelligent civilization intercepting a message can be extremely low, and even if contact is made, establishing a fruitful conversation can be frustrating when the response can take tens of thousands of years. The aliens may not even understand the signal: as a test for the Arecibo message, Frank Drake, its designer, published the letter to some fellow scientists, including a number of Nobel laureates. None of them understood.
There are other concerns. More than a decade ago, Professor Stephen Hawking warned that people should refrain from sending messages into space in case they attract the wrong attention. “If aliens visit us, the result will be similar to when Columbus landed in America, which was not good for the Indians,” he told a Discovery documentary.
But Dr. Jiang and his colleagues say that an alien species capable of communicating in space may have learned the value of peace and cooperation, and humanity could learn a lot from them. “We believe that the advances in science that can be made in pursuing this task, if communication is established, would far outweigh the concerns,” they wrote.
Dr Anders Sandberg, a senior fellow at the Institute for the Future of Humanity at Oxford University, said: “My view is that the overall risks and benefits of sending messages are small; it is better and safer for us to move into space and hope that we will eventually find neighbors when we are both adult species. “
But he said it was worth thinking about how we could communicate with aliens. “I think this is something we need to see as training to learn better coordination as a species,” he added.
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