Beacon in the Galaxy—NASA Has New Message for Alien Life—The Truth is Out There
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I believe in life on other planets, because, unlike the God myth, it makes great sense. As a matter of fact, thinking we humans are the only habituated planet out of hundreds, and hundreds of trillions is just not sustainable.
NASA is actually trying to talk to them, although the late Stephen Hawking said that could be dangerous, should the aliens turn out to be nasty. Beamed via interstellar radio in 1974 from its namesake telescope, the Arecibo, its message was “humanity’s first attempt to send out a missive capable of being understood by extraterrestrial intelligence,” per Scientific American, which reports on efforts to develop a sequel, nicknamed “Beacon in the Galaxy.”
Last month, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab proposed a design for a new transmission, which builds on previous efforts to convey information about earthling science. Importantly, it “also features a freshly designed return address that will help any alien listeners pinpoint our location in the galaxy so they can—hopefully—kick off an interstellar conversation” (or—hopefully not—come and eat us).
What to say and how to say it? Assuming anyone who receives the signal already has advanced scientific knowledge, the “what” is a matter of choosing content with universal appeals, such as a numeric system or DNA sequence. The “how” part is “far messier.” Written language is basically useless; even our numeric symbols are “entirely arbitrary.” Like many predecessors, the Beacon team puts its faith in bitmap design, using binary code to create a pixelated image.
“The on/off, present/absent nature of a binary seems like it would be recognized by any intelligent (not Trumpers) species.” The proposal frontloads the message with basic science, but it also includes some imagery, on the off-chance ET eyeballs work like ours. On a very practical level, the Arecibo telescope was recently destroyed in a freak disaster. Potential alternatives were designed to receive, not transmit, and retrofitting them is no trivial matter. (Read the full story.)
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I believe there is a vast (and that’s an understatement) distance between life and life that’s like us. Even the assumption that life must proceed toward air breathing animals with mechanical ability and appendages that enable making and operating advanced technology – that have the kind of intelligence that would make them want to is a huge leap. We rarely stop to consider the deadly nature of most of our galaxy or all the factors that make a planet not only habitable by more than slime mold much less something with brains and opposable thumbs. That took billions of years on this planet which is very unusual in its rotational stability and high magnetic field combined with a very large gas giant to reduce the large numbers of asteroids and comets that would make advanced life possible both in its evolution and survival. We keep discovering more and more mass extinction events, any one of which could have easily made our existence impossible. The idea, once again, that anything like us could evolve even on an identical planet with an identical sun in a low radiation position in the galaxy and that somehow survived against all odds seems vanishingly small to me. Even something like the improbable event of some ancient protozoan would merge with a cell and become a mitochondrion seems so improbably small. I think we simply cannot imagine alien life at all. Why would there even be plants and animals instead of some other alien kinds of life?
And then, of course there’s the argument that they could hop in their saucers and show up in New Mexico. The laws of physics are real enough that it isn’t going to happen. There isn’t enough energy to get a spacecraft to more than a tiny fraction of light speed and if somehow some thing could steal the energy of a galaxy for that purpose we would long since have detected it. Communication with nearby star systems might be possible, but those don’t number nearly in the trillions and any conversation that takes thousands of years to get a reply runs up against humanities tiny attention span. Besides I’m also betting that we won’t be building such equipment a thousand years hence – if we’re here at all.
This is a good comment and could have been a post. I think I might make it one.
I concur. Thinking we humans are the only habituated planet out of hundreds, and hundreds of trillions is hubris. I expect intelligent life out there and suspect it here among us already.