Guided by the same mentality, a team of international scientists led by NASA has developed a new message that proposes to be transmitted across the galaxy in the hope of making the first contact with intelligent aliens. The interstellar ship, known as the Beacon in the Galaxy, opens with simple communication principles, some basic concepts in mathematics and physics, the components of DNA and closes with information about man, Earth and a return address in case of distant recipients have the mind to answer. The team of researchers, led by Dr. Jonathan Jiang at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, says that with technical upgrades, the binary message could be transmitted to the heart of the Galaxy by the Allen Array of Telescopes at the Seti Institute in California, 500 meters. Spherical diaphragm radio telescope in China. The researchers say the message could, with upgrades, be sent from the global radio telescope with a 500-meter aperture to China. Photo: Xinhua / REX / Shutterstock In a preliminary work, which has not been evaluated by peers, scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the center of the Galaxy – an area that is considered the most promising for the appearance of life. “Humanity has, we argue, a fascinating history to share and a desire to get to know others – and now it has the means to do so,” the scientists wrote. The message, if it ever leaves Earth, would not be the first. Beacon in the Galaxy is loosely based on Arecibo’s message sent in 1974 by an observatory in Puerto Rico. This was aimed at a star cluster about 25,000 light-years away, so it will not arrive soon. Since then, a number of messages have been sent to the skies, including an advertisement for Doritos and an invitation, written in Klingon, to a Klingon Opera House in The Hague. Such interstellar communication efforts are not simple. The chances of an intelligent culture intercepting a message can be extremely low, and even if there was contact, creating a fruitful conversation could be frustrating when a response can take tens of thousands of years. The aliens may not even understand the signal: as a test case for Arecibo’s message, its designer, Frank Drake, published the mission to a number of fellow scientists, including some 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 if they get the wrong kind of attention. “If aliens visit us, the result would be like when Columbus landed in America, which was not good for Native Americans,” he said in a Discovery documentary. But Dr. Jiang and his colleagues argue that an alien species capable of communicating around the world may well have learned the value of peace and cooperation, and that humanity could learn much from it. “We believe that the advances in science that can be made to achieve this goal, if communication were to take place, would far outweigh the concerns,” they wrote. Dr Anders Sandberg, a senior fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, said: “My view is that the overall risk and benefit of texting are both small. “It’s better and safer for us to move in space and hope to eventually find neighbors when we are both adult species.” But he said it’s worth thinking about how we can communicate with aliens. “I think it’s something we need to consider as education to learn to better coordinate as a species,” he added.
