NASA Wants to Beam a Message to Aliens, But It Could Give Away Humanity’s Greatest Secrets
Scientists from NASA are rewriting the iconic Voyager message for the 21st century.
The message would be broadcast from China’s enormous FAST radio telescope.
Its contents include math basics and the building blocks of human life.
Scientists from NASA have cooked up a new comprehensive method for beaming messages into space. The goal, according to the new research, is to broadcast humanity’s special signature to anyone (anything?) who may be listening.
The paper, which has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, envisions this message as a replacement to an iconic 1974 broadcast of similar material that came from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which was decommissioned following a collapse in 2020. The new message would be broadcast from China as well as northern California, and the researchers have carefully selected a portion of the Milky Way that they say is more likely to contain intelligent life receptive to the message.
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The Arecibo Observatory made huge news globally when it partially collapsed in 2020. The iconic telescope at the center of the observatory complex was built on a naturally-occurring sinkhole that provided a curved surface, and for over 50 years it was the largest telescope in the world. It made sense, then, for an interstellar message to be beamed from the observatory in 1974. By the time Arecibo was decommissioned in 2020, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China had already displaced it as the world’s largest telescope. FAST was also constructed in a naturally-occurring basin in the Guizhou province of southern China, not far from the border with Vietnam.
“The illuminated aperture of the FAST is 300 m, and its overall performance and sensitivity are several times higher than was Arecibo’s and those of the other existing radio telescopes,” the researchers explain in their paper. That sounds great, but right now, FAST is a “receive only” radio telescope, meaning it can’t send messages even if we wanted it to. But the researchers express hope that FAST, as well as SETI’s listening telescope array in northern California, could be fitted in order to broadcast a message. “Both may possibly be upgraded through future enhancements that will enable the transmission of messages as well,” the researchers explain.
It’s this hypothetical that the scientists want to take on—in a sense, they’re preparing a statement in advance of the event that might warrant it. One critique they express over the 1974 broadcast and the subsequent Voyager “golden record” that shared similar data is that they believe images are a waste of space in this context. That may sound like a bummer, but their reasoning is sound: images even just 128-by-128 pixels require more than 16,000 individual bits in order to transmit, and “if humanity were receiving a message containing these depictions, it is not clear we would understand what they meant.” The results aren’t worth the effort, basically.
In contrast, the scientists believe “binary is likely universal across all intelligence,” making it a great way to communicate mathematical ideas that are also more likely to be relatable even if cultural markers are very different among an extraterrestrial audience. They even include a binary-based explainer of the base-10 system of mathematics that humans use, meaning the countable digits zero through nine that increment by groups of tens, hundreds, and so forth. We must also include units of measurement for different scientific ideas, like, the scientists suggest, the electrochemical signature of the element hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.
The message these scientists describe includes a quick-and-dirty primer on the nature of human life itself, from the four base chemicals of DNA—adenosine, cytidine, guanosine, and thymidine—to the essential amino acids and glucose that help to power life itself. And there are some more logistical questions, like including some kind of timestamp of when the message was sent from Earth, critical to the calculation of distance and time lapsed, as well as a way to find Earth within the context of the Milky Way galaxy.
From there, the scientists detail the best date and time to send such a message, including the angle of the sun that will least disturb the broadcast as well as the best time for Earth’s atmosphere. “It is calculated the dates when the Earth-Sun-ETI target region will reach this relative position of 90° is around March 30th and October 4th each year, and the right ascension of the observation target needs to reach -80.5°, the center time is 07:05 and 18:41 on the corresponding dates, Beijing local time,” the researchers explain.
All of this seems pretty sound, pun intended. It’s cool to want to talk to other civilizations, and it’s cool that these scientists are basically iterating and improving upon the messages sent out decades ago to try to greet those civilizations. But there’s a potential downside to being too transparent with our galactic neighbors. Some experts have theorized for decades that we might not want their attention at all, which, they say, could explain why we’ve also never heard from another civilization ourselves. They could all be staying quiet on purpose.
If whoever’s out there is a nemesis in waiting, then what we’re doing is akin to, say, beaming out our exact locations and special vulnerabilities to the Nazis right before the Battle of the Bulge. Other civilizations may have caught snippets of weird radio waves and other transmissions that bounce their way into space, but with specific reference points for things like base-10 mathematics and the building blocks of human life, you could argue we’re doing intergalactic TMI without a guarantee that whoever’s listening is really a friend.
But that’s all for some future people to argue about once the FAST or SETI telescopes have been fitted to broadcast at all. (And for decades, the same debate has raged within SETI itself—whether to only listen, or to listen as well as transmit.) In the meantime, it makes a lot of sense to write down one version of the message and offer it to the scientific community for discussion of exactly these pros and cons. What do you think is key for humanity to transmit into space? Would you stick with old Gilligan’s Island scripts from the TV airwaves, or would you hand over the keys to life itself?
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