Scientists Come Up With New Message To Communicate With Aliens

A team of scientists came up with a new message that could strike up a conversation with intelligent alien life sharing the galaxy with us earthlings.

The new interstellar message named the Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG), is the latest attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial beings in the universe. The very first of such attempts were made in 1974 from Puerto Rico’s Arecibo telescope to a star cluster, according to VICE.

While the researchers are essentially trying to say “hello” to aliens (assuming they exist), it is believed that there is no use in writing a message in human languages. Therefore, Jonathan Jiang, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and his colleagues came up with a new design for the message they hope to send. They published a paper on the message earlier this month.

If it is transmitted, and if an extraterrestrial civilization is capable of receiving the message with a radio telescope, then it is safe to presume that the aliens are familiar with science and mathematics. However, they may not depict numerals the same way humans do. That is why the team first wants to establish a means of communication. They proposed presenting the message as a bitmap, which uses binary code to create a pixelated image.

“The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface,” Jiang and his team said in the study.

“The message concludes with digitized images of the human form, along with an invitation for any receiving intelligences to respond,” they added.

Along with a map of the earth, the message also includes a radio frequency for the aliens to respond along with coordinates of our solar system in the galaxy.

“We know the location of more than 50 globular clusters,” Jiang said, according to Scientific American. “If there’s an advanced civilization, we bet that, if they know astrophysics, they know the globular cluster locations as well, so we can use this as a coordinate to pinpoint the location of our solar system.”

The scientists suggested broadcasting the message to a dense ring of stars near the center of our galaxy. Jiang and his colleagues are discussing the transmission of the message. If they do get a chance to transmit the 13-page message, researchers believe it is best to broadcast the message in March or October.