New Delhi: Humans have been attempting to connect with alien life for over 150 years, albeit unsuccessfully—or at least none that the public knows of. Now, in a new bid to contact the ulterior life forms, scientists are reportedly looking to thirst trap aliens by firing a snap of two nude people into deep space. A group of scientists at NASA have developed a new message that could be beamed to intelligent aliens who might exist in the Milky Way, according to a report by Scientific American.
The new space-bound note named the Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG) was devised by Jonathan Jiang, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues, who published their motivations and methodology in a study on a preprint site.
A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects https://t.co/W1Lnez0vSS #Astrobiology #SETI #CarlSagan pic.twitter.com/oCBn1xzLB9
— Astrobiology (@astrobiology) March 24, 2022
The group hopes to contact other life forms in the universe by sending a cartoon of two nude people out of Earth’s atmosphere to peak potential aliens’ curiosity and encourage communication.
The project also includes a depiction of gravity, and DNA, along with a pixilated drawing of a nude human male and female waving hello.
According to the scientists, they have chosen these images because of the challenges of communicating with foreign species which may have a completely different form of language to humanity.
“The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface,” the scientists behind the project write in the preprint.
The message is reportedly coded in binary, a universal language of sorts, and uses a series of 1s and 0s. “Though the concept of mathematics in human terms is potentially unrecognizable to ETI, binary is likely universal across all intelligence,” the researchers said. “Binary is the simplest form of mathematics as it involves only two opposing states: zero and one, yes or no, black or white, mass or empty space. Hence, the transmission of the code as binary would very likely be understandable to all ETI and is the basis of the BITG message,” they added.
Over the years, humans have sent many messages to outer space intended for aliens, including the physical Golden Records onboard NASA’s Voyager probes. However, most of these attempts were marred in controversy, with some experts warning that broadcasting Earth’s position in the galaxy could invite danger to our world from potentially hostile species. Jiang and his colleagues acknowledge this risk, but counter it by saying that any aliens capable of deciphering the BITG message would not likely be aggressive conquerors.
