An international team of scientists, made up of researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and several universities in the United States, China and the United Kingdom, is working on a controversial project: preparing to use the Chinese Celestial Eye to broadcast our position in the universe and basic information about Earth to potential alien worlds, in the hope that aliens will respond when they receive it.
The project, led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will send the most powerful, up to 25,500 bytes of signal to date to the M13 globular cluster of 22,180 light-years, containing the most Earth and human information ever recorded, in nearly 3 minutes.
The project combines information from all previous projects that have attempted to get in touch with alien intelligent civilizations, such as the 1974 Arecibo message, which was also sent to M13 but only 210 bytes (1679 binary digits); gold-plated aluminum plate information carried by Pioneers 10 and 11; gold record information carried by Voyager 1 and 2; and messages sent to extraterrestrial intelligent creatures (METI) by the Active Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations in the last decade or two.
Scientists refer to this information as BITG, which means "Milky Way Beacon." BITG is an update of the 1974 Arecibo message, consisting of 204,000 binary numbers, divided into 13 parts, containing graphic information in the form of images and a new combination of special "letters" for representing numbers, elements, DNA, land, oceans, humans, etc., and starting and ending with a prime number set, so that aliens can easily know that this is information from an intelligent civilization.
The BITG message also contains a position information that marks the position of the solar system in the Milky Way as seen from the M13 globular cluster; it also creates a timestamp using hydrogen spin flipping that marks the location of the time we created/sent this information relative to the time of the birth of the universe in theory.
In order to ensure that extraterrestrial intelligent life receives enthusiastic greetings from Earth's civilization, scientists in previous studies believe that the place where intelligent life is most likely to occur — a star system about 6,500 to 20,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way — is looking for targets, and finally identified the M13 globular cluster, because it is 11.66 billion years old, about 300,000 stars, and is a good candidate for the search for intelligent alien civilizations.
Telescopes capable of emitting BITG information, the first 500-meter aperture of China's Sky Eye and california SETI Institute's Allen telescope array, if aliens can build telescopes about the same size as the Arecibo telescope, then this greeting can be received anywhere in the Milky Way. This information is believed to be launched simultaneously on both telescopes.
However, there has always been a big controversy about actively sending information to aliens or broadcasting the location of the earth, and the famous physicist Hawking has compared the encounter between humans and alien intelligent life, comparing native Americans to Columbus, and any extraterrestrial advanced life form "may not think that we are more valuable than the bacteria we see." ”
But the BITG information team is optimistic that the benefits of connecting with aliens outweigh any potential risks, and that any species that can understand and interpret our information could be just as smart and wary of our presence.
Ironically, the earliest attempt to send information to aliens was a Morse message sent to Venus from Ukraine's Evpatoria planetary radar in 1962, with only three words in Russian, including "Mir," which means "peace" in Russian. But now, instead of having trouble with Ukraine, the aliens, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union who sent "peace" messages to the aliens, stormed into Ukraine and tore peace to shreds.
So we may not have to worry about any aliens at all, and what can hurt you is not the person who can't reach you in the sky, but the person who can swing the fist at you at any time, which is what you need to be most vigilant about.
Stay tuned: