The launch of NASA's James Webb and China's FAST telescope has intensified the search for extraterrestrial life.
"Beacon in the Galaxy"
A 13-page article titled "The Lighthouse inGalaxy" is a basic introduction to mathematics, chemistry and biology as people understand them. The article is heavily inspired by the work that became part of the Arecibo message from 1974. Hi-tech wrote about this high-profile attempt to contact aliens through interstellar radio communication earlier.
In the new article, scientists included the following details:as the best time of year to broadcast the message and potential targets. Among them is a dense ring of stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Another important detail of the updated message is the return address. It will allow any recipient to pinpoint the exact location of the Earth and send a “response.”
“Our goal is to provide the maximum number ofinformation about our society and the human species in a minimal amount, scientists explain. “With advances in digital technology, we can achieve more than we did in 1974.”
What else is in the new message?
The content of The Lighthouse in the Galaxy is also based onanother radio message called Cosmic Call or "Space Call", which was broadcast from the radio telescope of the Evpatoria telescope RT-70 in 2003. In this message was a raster "alphabet" using the spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom to denote the concept of time. Scientists also indicated the date of sending the message from Earth. In addition, in the message prepared by Jiang's team, there is a picture of a man and a woman, as well as a map of the Earth's surface and our exact cosmic address.
The Perfect Message Problem
Each of them must answer twofundamental questions: what and how to say. With the first part, everything is more or less clear: if aliens are able to build a telescope to catch a message, then we are at least at the same level of education and can discuss mathematics, physics and the nature of things.
Much harder to figure out how to encode theseconcepts in one communiqué. Human languages are out of the question, as well as our number systems. Although the concept of numbers is almost universal, in fact, people depict them quite arbitrarily. That is why the authors of The Lighthouse in the Galaxy propose to format the letter as a bitmap.
Raster image design philosophy forinterstellar communications dates back to the Arecibo message. This is a logical approach - the presence/absence of a binary system seems to be easily recognized by any intelligent species. But the strategy is not without flaws. When pioneering SETI scientist Frank Drake developed the Arecibo message prototype, he mailed the binary message to some colleagues, including several Nobel laureates. None of them could understand its contents, and only one guessed that the binary file must be a bitmap. As Scientific American points out, if some of the smartest humans have trouble understanding this form of message encoding, it's unlikely that aliens will do a better job.
How will the message be sent?
NASA scientists propose sending a message either withthe Allen Telescope Array in northern California, or the Five Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) radio telescope in China. However, both of them must be equipped with appropriate signal transmission equipment. For now they can only observe space.
How safe is it?
Sending a new message with a return address raises many questions. So, Scientific American is wondering how safe it is.
Messaging with aliens has always takenan ambiguous position within the wider SETI community, which is mostly focused on listening to alien signals rather than sending our own, much less with a return address. Opponents of this idea see the project as a waste of time at best and an existentially dangerous gamble at worst. The chances that people will send a message to the right place at the right time are extremely small. Besides, humanity has no idea who will read it. What if we give our address to an alien species that feeds on bipedal hominins?
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The Allen Telescope Array, ATA - Shareda project of the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. The telescope is an array of 42 satellite dishes (it is planned that in the future their number will reach 350) with a diameter of 6 m each.