NASA sends a message into space, scientists warn of ‘the risk of Earth being invaded’
A slide show in the message “Beacon In The Galaxy” emitted outside the Earth – Photo: Jonathan Jiang/NASA
At the end of March, experts at the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that they had written a message entitled “Beacon In The Galaxy” to the outside of the Earth.
This message is binary-encoded, broadcasting information about the Solar System, Earth’s surface, and humanity to the part of the Milky Way that has been identified as the most likely site for extraterrestrial civilizations.
This was an updated version of the Arecibo message from 1974, sending similar information into space using a radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
However, Dr Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), warned that sharing such information carries a very high risk.
Humans have tried to send many messages out to Earth in search of extraterrestrial civilizations, but have never received a response – Illustration: Shutterstock
Dr Anders Sandberg thinks the possibility of the message reaching an alien civilization is very low. “Beacon In The Galaxy” will have a hard time “traversing” interstellar space and (if) reaching some extraterrestrial civilization may not be as important as they are. we expect.
“The message we expect from them can be nothing more than a boring postcard,” says researcher Anders Sandberg.
On the contrary, he warned NASA’s out-of-Earth messaging could “have such a huge negative impact that it really needs to be taken seriously”. Specifically, the ability to accidentally reveal the location and trigger an alien invasion of Earth.
Another expert at Oxford University, Toby Ord, made a similar argument in The Precipice, The book, published in 2020, analyzes the existential and future risks of humanity.
Dr Ord said the question to ask is the ratio of peaceful civilizations to hostile civilizations.
“We have very little evidence of this being high or low, and there is no scientific consensus. Since the negative is likely to be much larger than the positive, it is not advisable to seek or send a message beyond the Earth. soil is not necessarily the right thing to do,” he stated in the book The Precipice.
What did the NASA team say?
“Beacon In The Galaxy” was invented by the team of Jonathan Jiang, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The message covers basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a common means of communication. This is followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the position of the Solar System in the Milky Way relative to known star clusters, as well as a description of the Solar System and the Earth’s surface numbered. chemical.
The message ends with digitized images of the human form along with an invitation for any civilization to respond.
Since we do not yet know what language the “alien” can “hear, read, speak, write” in, the experts in Jonathan Jiang’s team encoded the message in binary form and transmitted it with a telescope. 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope in China and the Allen Telescope Array of SETI Institute in California (USA) to an area in the galaxy thought to be most likely to have life.
NASA has not yet responded to the expert’s warning at Oxford University. Jiang and his colleagues also acknowledged the negative risk, but ultimately countered that any aliens capable of deciphering binary messages were unlikely to be aggressive invaders.
“Logically, a species that has reached the level of intelligence to be able to communicate through space should also know the importance of cosmic peace and cooperation,” said Jonathan Jiang’s research team.
at Blogtuan.info – Source: tuoitre.vn – Read the original article here
