Astronomers plan to send messages with info about humans and the location of Earth toward parts of space they think may be home to intelligent life.
Scientists think there are 300 million habitable planets in the Milky Way, and some may be home to intelligent life. Bruno Gilli/ESO, CC BY
I’m a professor of astronomy who has written extensively about the search for life in the universe. I also serve on the advisory council for a nonprofit research organization that’s designing messages to send to extraterrestrial civilizations. These spacecraft — as well as their twins, Pioneer 11 and Voyager 2 — have now all left the solar system. But in the immensity of space, the odds that these or any other physical objects will be found are fantastically minuscule.Astronomers beamed the first radio message designed for alien ears from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in 1974. The series of 1s and 0s was designed to convey simple information about humanity and biology and was sent toward the globular cluster M13.
One of these new messages will be sent from the world’s largest radio telescope, in China, sometime in 2023. The telescope, with a 1,640-foot diameter, will beam a series of radio pulses over a broad swath of sky. These on-off pulses are like the 1s and 0s of digital information. Ethical questionsThe prospect of alien contact is ripe with ethical questions, and METI is no exception.
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