Space researchers want to send a coded message to the aliens, including illustrations of nude humans.
The proposal, “A Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG), was submitted by 11 researchers from various institutions, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and was published this week on Arxiv, an open-access repository of scientific articles.
BITG proposes a binary-encoded message “developed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy” and will include scientific concepts, including the human form, according to the proposal.
The message will be based on previous messages sent to space, most notably the Arecibo message, an interstellar radio message sent to the globular cluster M13 in 1974, the researchers said.
NASA has already sent aspects of humanity into space. The 2021 Lucy Mission included a poem by Amanda Gorman, Beatles lyrics and quotes, and a fossil belonging to the ancient human ancestor that gave the mission its name.
The Voyager 1 and 2 missions carried with them golden phonograph records with images and sounds meant to reflect human culture.
BITG’s proposal plans to leave human culture and language out entirely, focusing on concepts that might be more readable to extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI): mathematics and physics.
“While the concept of mathematics in human terms is potentially unrecognizable to ETI, the binary system is likely universal across all intelligence,” the researchers said.
The message includes a time stamp and a location stamp, visual representations of the double helix structure of DNA and a hydrogen atom, visual explanations of algebra and other mathematical operations, an illustration of the solar system, a map of the Earth, and of course, a smiling illustration of two human bodies, one male and one female. The pair is waving at the viewer.
“This information is part of the basic expectation of any message to a TSI, as it allows recognition of our appearance – a detail of a given TSI that would undoubtedly be of interest to us and relevant if exchanges are established, or we will ever meet physically” , the scientists said.
In other words, aliens might be eager to see what humans look like, just as we would be curious to see if they match up with the bug-eyed green extraterrestrials of science fiction.
The messages end with an invitation for the extraterrestrials to respond using their own radio telescope.
The report proposes using the Fast Observable Field, the world’s largest radio telescope, located in Guizhou, China, to send the message.
“The message is simple but significant,” the researchers said, with the ultimate goal of “initiating a dialogue with the ETI – no matter how far into the future this may occur.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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