A drawing of her NASA which includes the transmission of its position Land in space via a signal could accidentally trigger an alien invasion, Oxford scientists have warned.
The binary coded message “Beacon In The Galaxy” will transmit information about the solar system, the Earth’s surface and humanity to a part of our Galaxy that has been identified as the most likely home aliens cultures.
This is an updated version of the Arecibo message, which sent similar information into space in 1974 using a radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
However, Anders Sandberg, a senior fellow at the Oxford Institute for the Future of Humanity (FHI), warned that sharing such information was risky.
“It has such a big impact that you have to take it quite seriously”
Anders Sandberg told the Daily Telegraph that while the chances of the message reaching an alien civilization are slim, “it has such a huge impact that you have to take it quite seriously.”
He said the “havoc factor” surrounding extraterrestrial intelligence research meant that “many people refuse to take anything related to it seriously, which is a shame because it’s important.”
Dr. Sandberg also said that, given the difficulty of crossing interstellar space, a message received even from a very advanced culture may be little more than “a postcard saying, ‘I wish you were here.’
Toby Ord, a colleague of Dr. Sandberg at the FHI, made similar arguments in The Precipice, a book published in 2020 that analyzed the existential dangers and the future of humanity. Dr Ord said the main question was the ratio of peaceful cultures to hostile ones.
He added: “We have very little information on whether this is high or low, and there is no scientific consensus. “Given that the negatives could be much greater than the positives, this does not sound like a good situation in which we could take active steps towards contact.”
What will the message to the alien civilizations include?
The programmed message, which will end with an invitation to the aliens to respond, includes basic mathematical and physical concepts for creating a global medium of communication, followed by information about the biochemical composition of life on Earth.
It will also convey the position of the solar system in relation to large star clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the solar system, the Earth’s surface, and male and female humans.
Nasa does not intend to send the message itself, but instead proposes that it be transmitted by China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope and the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California.
The project team of researchers said that communication “is an incredibly interesting development in the scientific exploration of the universe.”
Source: News Beast
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