An updated communication could be beamed out for space alien listeners in hopes of making first contact
Upon discovering the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth, the first question we are most likely to ask is “How can we communicate?” As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1974 Arecibo message—humanity’s first attempt to send out a missive capable of being understood by extraterrestrial intelligence—the question feels more urgent than ever.
Message Basics Every interstellar message must address two fundamental questions: what to say and how to say it. Nearly all the messages that humans have broadcast into space so far start by establishing common ground with a basic lesson in science and mathematics, two topics that are presumably familiar to both ourselves and extraterrestrials. If a civilization beyond our planet is capable of building a radio telescope to receive our message, it probably knows a thing or two about physics.
In 2017 Vakoch and his colleagues sent the first interstellar message transmitting scientific information since 2003 to a nearby star. It, too, was coded in binary, but it eschewed bitmaps for a message design that explored the concepts of time and radio waves by referring back to the radio wave carrying the message. Jiang and his colleagues chose another path. They based much of their design on the 2003 Cosmic Call broadcast from the Yevpatoriaradio telescope in Ukraine.
To Send or Not? Jiang and his colleagues propose sending their message from either the Allen Telescope Array in northern California or the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China. Since the recent destruction of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, these two radio telescopes are the only ones in the world that are actively courting SETI researchers. At the moment, though, both telescopes are only capable of listening to the cosmos, not talking to it.
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