Extraterrestrial Intelligence Messaging Has Changed Recently

On April 1st this year, a team of scientists led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a proposed new message to be sent to prospective intelligent extraterrestrials. The coincidence of April Fool’s Day in this case should be ignored. This actually is very real. The rationale for the message can be found in an article entitled, “A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects,” which has been submitted to the journal Galaxy and is currently posted on a pre-print server for review.

The article title includes the terms FAST and SETI. If you are not familiar with FAST, the acronym stands for the Five-Hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope being built in China (see picture above) that will be the largest parabolic radio telescope in the world and capable of intercepting the faintest radio signals from across the Universe. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is far better known and was featured prominently in the science fiction movie, Contact, based on a Carl Sagan novel.

What kind of message is being sent? And how will intelligent aliens be able to decipher it? Since the first radios and television signals were broadcast, humanity has been streaming information into outer space with no thought of how the information would be perceived by an intelligent technically advanced civilization on the receiving end. And even before radios, sending a message to intelligent aliens was proposed. In the early 1800s an Austrian astronomer wanted to carve out a geometric pattern of trenches in the Sahara Desert, fill them with kerosene and then light it all up tobe a beacon for any aliens living nearby.

Other notable dates and efforts include:

• 1962 when the Soviet Union scientists transmitted a symbolic message in Morse Code to Venus that spelled out the Russian word for peace.
• 1974, when Carl Sagan and colleagues created a message transmitted by the Arecibo radio telescope and directed towards a star cluster more than 25,000 light-years away. The message contained a pictorial image transmitted at one-million times the strength of television signals and indicated the location of our planet, information about DNA, our species, and our physical appearance.
• 1977, two Voyager spacecraft journeyed to the Solar System’s outer planets, each of them carrying a gold disk containing images from Earth, sounds, music and pictographic instructions to build a playing mechanism to read the information. Today the Voyagers are travelling in interstellar space and will take thousands of years before reaching a nearby star.
• 2008, a food company, Doritos, targeted stars 42 light-years away with a message written in Klingon, a made-up language featured in the science fiction series, Star Trek.

This brings us to 2022 with a proposed new message. It is written in the language of computing, binary code and includes mathematical and physical concepts to help intelligent extraterrestrials decode it. The content includes:

• the biochemical composition of life on Earth.
• a time-stamped position of the Solar System in the Milky Way Galaxy relative to known globular clusters as geolocation markers (see map at the bottom of this posting).
• digitized depictions of the Solar System, Earth, and the human species.
• an invitation for those receiving the information to respond.

The proposed transmitters include China’s FAST, and the SETI Institute’s Alien Telescope Array (ATA) of 350 dish antennae that operate in concert, located in Northern California.

In two science fiction films, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “Contact,” screenwriters paid attention to mathematics and physics in telling the story of alien encounters. In the former, messaging appeared as prime numbers with music as an expression of a universal language. In the latter, the signal received by SETI was a string of prime numbers, and underneath it was an image containing a repeat of what the alien intelligence had received from Earth (the broadcast of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games). Later scientists decoded an underlying complex schematic, the blueprint for a machine that could be built to make alien contact.

Binary code uses zeroes and ones in combinations. This is base-10 mathematics. Why we settled on 10 has more to do with our anatomy than any logic. We are a species with ten fingers, and toes. But before the world settled on base-10, the Babylonians invented mathematics using base-6. That’s why a circle is 360 degrees, minutes and hours are divided by 60, and days are calculated in multiples of six hours. So I’m not sure binary code as a universal messaging construct will immediately be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence with 12 arms or none at all.

Prime numbers, however, are a whole different story. These numbers are only divisible by themselves and the number one. It would seem more apt to construct a message using them. Communicating a repetition of prime numbers represented by distinct pulses and sent light-years away would more likely be recognized as not natural in origin but from a technical civilization.

Another communication paradigm would be to use numeric equivalents of the elements starting with hydrogen and working from the simple to the heavy. To explain a carbon-based life form (this is us) to a silicon-based extraterrestrial using numbers derived from the table of elements would be an interesting challenge.

Then there are maps. Always useful when communicating directions, a map could work when contacting intelligent alien species. Specific stars highlighted within the Milky Way Galaxy could give aliens points of reference to understand where we are. Our map could mark the galaxy centre and where the Sun and Solar System are relatively located. This could make it possible for extraterrestrial intelligence to figure out from where our message originates.

A lot of what is in this new proposed message could make sense to a receptive alien intelligence. If the proposed message were to be sent today to Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbouring star with exoplanets circling it, if received, decoded, and responded to, the earliest we would hear back would be nine years from now. But more than likely it could be thousands of Earth-years before we get a response to a message we send. Maybe not hearing back isn’t the issue. Maybe it’s enough to say, “Hey, we’re here!” Because unless wormholes exist, or we develop trans-light speed spaceships (Warp drives), it is unlikely that anyone alive in the next few centuries will ever get a reply to what is being proposed now.