“A Beacon in the Galaxy”
Math, maps, naked pictures: Researchers want to send encrypted messages to extraterrestrials
The message in binary code could be read by the Chinese radio telescope FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) be sent into space
© Ou Dongqu/Xinhua
is there anyone out there Mankind has been asking this question since time immemorial. With the support of NASA, a team of researchers has developed new ideas for contacting extraterrestrials. Some of these are very graphic.
The question of whether we’re alone “out there” has long occupied science and popular culture. However, if intelligent extraterrestrial life does exist somewhere in our galaxy: how do the aliens find their way to earth?
This is exactly where the proposal by eleven space researchers comes in, which was supported, among others, by the well-known NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Under the title “A Beacon in the Galaxy”, the scientists have worked out in detail what such a message for aliens could look like. In addition to a map of the solar system and our planet, the researchers also want to send a sketch of naked people in binary code into the vastness of space.
The team published the ideas at the beginning of April on the freely accessible scientific online server “Arxiv”. Several US media had reported about it.
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The information in binary code was specifically “designed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy,” the researchers write. As a means of communication, they would rely on “fundamental mathematical and physical concepts” that could be understood by the widest possible spectrum of intelligent life forms. “Although the concept of mathematics in human terms for ETI [Anm. d. Red.: kurz für ‘extraterrestrial intelligence’, außerirdische Intelligenz] may not be recognizable, the binary language is likely to be universal to all intelligences,” the researchers write.
The message includes a location and time stamp, visual algebra explanations, a visual representation of the DNA double helix and a hydrogen atom, an image of our solar system, and a map of planet Earth, among other things. What is particularly interesting, however, is a simple depiction of two people waving – man and woman are naked. All of this is “one of the basic expectations of every message to an ETI, as it enables us to recognize our appearance,” the authors continue.
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Earlier attempts, such as the interstellar radio message “Arecibo” sent into space in 1974, should serve as a model. As the US news channel CNN reports, this would not be the first attempt to make contact with extraterrestrial species.
During last year’s Lucy mission, NASA sent a poem by US poet Amanda Gorman, lyrics by the Beatles and a fossil of human ancestors into the vast voids of our galaxy. The two space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had gold discs on board as early as the 1970s. The images and sounds stored on it were intended to give potential recipients an impression of human culture. Representations of naked people are also nothing new in alien communication. About 50 years ago, NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 missions attached plaques with human nude images to the spacecraft.
“Beacon in the Galaxy,” the scientists suggest, could be sent into space by China’s FAST radio telescope, the largest of its kind on Earth. Whether they actually get an answer at some point is of course in the stars.
Sources: archive: “A Beacon in the Galaxy”; CNN