(ORDO NEWS) — Scientists plan to send a radio message to extraterrestrial civilizations into deep space, which will contain information about the location of the Earth, in the hope that someday this message will be received and deciphered, and earthlings will receive an answer. The corresponding article is posted on the site of electronic preprints arXiv.org.
This action, called Beacon in the Galaxy – BITG – “Galactic Beacon” (BITG), in fact, is an updated version of the famous Arecibo message, which was transmitted for the same purpose on November 16, 1974 by the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico in the direction globular star cluster M13, located at a distance of 25 thousand light years from Earth in the constellation Hercules.
Older radio messages contained a binary code – zeros and ones – that could be formed into a rectangle or square, containing images of figures of men and women, the solar system, and the DNA device.
BITG will also include drawings of DNA, the solar system, and figures of a man and a woman, but will contain much more information about the basics of mathematics and science. For example, there will be listed the most common elements on Earth, a map of the earth’s continents and an invitation to respond to this message.
Although the prospects for contact with an alien civilization seem exciting to many, transmitting information about the location of the Earth into space is considered a potentially reckless move, which, in particular, was discouraged by the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who expressed fears that extraterrestrial intelligence could be aggressive and try to destroy future competitors.
“If you look at earth history, you will see that contacts between civilizations at different levels of development most often ended in disaster for those who were less developed,” Hawking recalled.
However, the BITG project participants believe that the benefits that open up to mankind after contact with aliens will outweigh the potential risks, and nevertheless propose to carry out the transmission using the FAST spherical radio telescope with a five hundred meter aperture in China or through the Allen array of radio telescopes of the SETI Institute in Northern California.
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