Time to send a new message to the aliens?-Information Technology

Scientists have created a new message for extraterrestrials (ET). However, the technology required to send messages is not yet ready. And if information is transmitted, it will take thousands of years to reach its destination.

Giant spherical telescope located in Guizhou province, China

“We wanted to send a message in a bottle in the cosmic ocean,” said Jonathan Jiang, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

The message designed by Jiang and his team builds on previous missions that humans have sent to space; In fact, the researchers timed the creation of a new message for the 50th anniversary of the Arecibo message, the high power’s first attempt at extraterrestrial contact.

The 1974 message used binary code and conveyed information about the human base 10 numbering system, common key elements, and a map of the solar system.

The new message also encodes information in binary form and describes the basic math, physics and biology the aliens need to understand humans, including descriptions of DNA, amino acids and glucose. It also contains maps of the Milky Way, the solar system, and the Earth itself, including information about the planet’s makeup and atmosphere.

Jiang and his team used globular clusters in the Milky Way as landmarks on their proposed map. These globular clusters are bright and easy to see, and they have enough distinguishing features that they can act as useful signposts.

But how to convey this new message to an alien civilization?

Message co-designer Qitian Jin of Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands says the answer lies in the hydrogen atom. The neutral hydrogen found in interstellar gas can transition to a high-energy state after colliding with other atoms or electrons.

After about 10 million years, one of these high-energy hydrogens undergoes a transition back to a lower energy state – an event known as a spin-flip transition. This circular transition provides a convenient universal unit of time for communication in the period after the Big Bang in which the message was sent.

Multiple messages with timestamps and updates could be sent, Jin added, so that an alien civilization could theoretically learn more about Earth over time.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) can be divided into two methods: passive and active. In passive SETI, scientists use giant telescopes to listen for or look for signs that intelligent life is out there. Such hints could include radio waves, sent accidentally or intentionally by an alien civilization.

SETI is actively involved in sending signals. These efforts are less common, and most are by far largely symbolic. In 1972 and 1973, the Pioneer spacecraft was launched with a pair of plaques depicting the strokes of a man and a woman and symbols intended to represent the origins of the craft. These arrays are the first human messages designed to travel beyond the solar system, but the chances of them being found in the vastness of space are slim.

The proposed new message would be projected to a ring of stars about 13,000 light-years, Jiang said. This region is thought to contain several planets in the habitable zone of their stars, he said.

“If there are aliens, chances are they are there,” he said.