Should an alien intelligence know what we’re up to on Earth? 👽
Jonathan Jiang of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has set out to answer that very question, according to a reportThough we are yet to find extraterrestrial life, the search is heating up thanks to projects such as China's FAST Telescope andJiang's team at NASA outlined a new design for a message aimed at intelligent alien life forms in a new paper published in the The 13-page paper, titled"Beacon in the Galaxy" is a basic introduction to mathematics, chemistry, and...
In their new paper, Jiang's team included details such as the best time of year to broadcast their message and potential targets for their message, including a dense ring of stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. One important detail that this message also adds is a return address that should allow any receiver to pinpoint the exact location of Earth and send back their own message.
In a reversal of the idea presented in that movie, the NASA researchers set out to make their message as easy to decipher as possible for a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence that has no concept of our language or our numerical systems, which evolved arbitrarily due to cultural influences throughout the history of humanity. That's why they decided to present their message as a bitmap, a medium that uses binary code to create a pixelated image.
The new"Beacon in the Galaxy" message also borrows from another similar project called Cosmic Call, which was broadcast from the Yevpatoriaradio telescope in Ukraine in 2003. That message featured a custom bitmap"alphabet" that uses the spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom to connote the idea of time, before marking the date on which the transmission was sent from Earth.
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NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei back on Earth after record-breaking missionChelsea Gohd joined Space.com as an intern in the summer of 2018 and returned as a Staff Writer in 2019. After receiving a B.S. in Public Health, she worked as a science communicator at the American Museum of Natural History. Chelsea has written for publications including Scientific American, Discover Magazine Blog, Astronomy Magazine, Live Science, All That is Interesting, AMNH Microbe Mondays blog, The Daily Targum and Roaring Earth. When not writing, reading or following the latest space and science discoveries, Chelsea is writing music, singing, playing guitar and performing with her band Foxanne (foxannemusic). You can follow her on Twitter chelsea_gohd.
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