As we are approaching the silver jubilee of the 1974 Arecibo communication first mankind’s effort to give a signal understandable by alien intelligence the topic appears more pressing than ever. Remotely sensed data technology advancements have shown that the greater part of stars in our galaxy contains planets and that many of these celestial bodies appear to be susceptible to harboring liquid water on their surfaces a need for sustaining life on earth. In early March, an international team of scientists led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Jonathan Jiang published a paper on the preprint site arXiv.org detailing a new layout for a signal meant for extra-terrestrial receivers. The 13-page “Beacon in the Galaxy” letter is intended to be a fundamental exposure to mathematics, chemistry, and biology, drawing significantly on the structure of the Arecibo transmission and other earlier attempts at reaching extra-terrestrial life. The scientists offered a comprehensive strategy for the optimal time of year to transmit the message, as well as a thick belt of stars around the core of our universe as a preferred destination.
Furthermore, the communication includes a newly developed tracking number, which will assist any extra-terrestrial listeners in determining our position in the galaxy and, ideally, initiating an interplanetary dialogue. “The idea for the concept was to provide the most understanding about our civilization and the human species in the shortest amount of communication,” Jiang explains. “With advances in digital technology, we can do far better than the Arecibo message of 1974.
” With such a framework in effect, the message explains the concept of space and identifies when the broadcast was delivered from Earth, presents essential denominators from the periodic table, and reveals the composition and chemistry of DNA. “An upgraded, binary-coded communication has been constructed for delivery to alien intelligent life forms in the Milky Way galaxy,” claimed the study’s findings. “The suggested message incorporates fundamental mathematical and physical ideas in order to develop a global channel of communication.”
The NASA researchers set out to create their message as simple to interpret as practicable for a hypothesized alien intelligence that has no notion of our language or number systems, which emerged randomly through time owing to cultural dimensions. That’s why they chose to portray their message as a bitmap, a media that generates a fragmented image using binary information. If Jiang and his colleagues are successful in getting their message out there, humans will make another remarkable achievement in the cosmos in the anticipation that aliens would intercept and respond back to our signal, albeit this may take several years.
