“But that’s a big ‘if,’ and even if they can see, there is so much culture embedded in the way we represent objects.
#NASA CONFIRMS ALIEN INVASION HOW TO#
“One of the key ideas is that, because vision has evolved independently many times on Earth, that means aliens will have it, too,” says Douglas Vakoch, president of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, a nonprofit devoted to researching how to communicate with other life-forms. Furthermore, it is not even clear that space aliens will be able to see the images contained within the message if they do receive it. If some of the smartest humans struggle to understand this form of encoding a message, it seems unlikely that an extraterrestrial would fare any better. None of them were able to understand its contents, and only one figured out that the binary was meant to be a bitmap. When pioneering search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) scientist Frank Drake designed a prototype of the Arecibo message, he sent the binary message by post to some colleagues, including several Nobel laureates. But the strategy is not without its shortcomings. It is a logical approach-the on/off, present/absent nature of a binary seems like it would be recognized by any intelligent species. The bitmap design philosophy for interstellar communication stretches back to the Arecibo message. Preprint posted online Ma(CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Credit: “A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects,” by Jonathan H. A sample from a new message intended to be sent toward potential intelligent extraterrestrials in the galaxy.
#NASA CONFIRMS ALIEN INVASION CODE#
This is why many attempts, including “Beacon in the Galaxy,” opt to design their letter as a bitmap, a way to use binary code to create a pixelated image. Though the concept of numbers is nearly universal, the way we depict them as numerals is entirely arbitrary. Human languages are out of the question for obvious reasons, but so are our numeral systems. A far messier question is how to encode these concepts into the communiqué. If a civilization beyond our planet is capable of building a radio telescope to receive our message, it probably knows a thing or two about physics. Nearly all the messages that humans have broadcast into space so far start by establishing common ground with a basic lesson in science and mathematics, two topics that are presumably familiar to both ourselves and extraterrestrials. “With improvements in digital technology, we can do much better than the in 1974.” Message BasicsĮvery interstellar message must address two fundamental questions: what to say and how to say it. “The motivation for the design was to deliver the maximum amount of information about our society and the human species in the minimal amount of message,” Jiang says. Importantly, the transmission also features a freshly designed return address that will help any alien listeners pinpoint our location in the galaxy so they can-hopefully-kick off an interstellar conversation. The researchers included a detailed plan for the best time of year to broadcast the message and proposed a dense ring of stars near the center of our galaxy as a promising destination.
The 13-page epistle, referred to as the “Beacon in the Galaxy,” is meant to be a basic introduction to mathematics, chemistry and biology that draws heavily on the design of the Arecibo message and other past attempts at contacting extraterrestrials. In early March an international team of researchers led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a paper on the preprint server that detailed a new design for a message intended for extraterrestrial recipients. The odds that at least one of these billions of planets has produced intelligent life seem favorable enough to spend some time figuring out how to say “hello.” Advances in remote sensing technologies have revealed that the vast majority of stars in our galaxy host planets and that many of these exoplanets appear capable of hosting liquid water on their surface-a prerequisite for life as we know it. Upon discovering the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth, the first question we are most likely to ask is “How can we communicate?” As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Arecibo message-humanity’s first attempt to send out a missive capable of being understood by extraterrestrial intelligence-the question feels more urgent than ever.
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