Should we transmit another message to possible extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy? Yes, say a team of scientists led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles, who have developed a binary-coded message that contains images of humans, our cosmic address and a request to RSVP.
If it’s transmitted, this so-called “Beacon in the Galaxy” will follow a tradition begun in 1974 when scientists sent a message containing basic information about us and our planet into space using the now-defunct Arecibo radio telescope.
It’s an update to the famed Arecibo message, which was designed by Frank Drake, an American astronomer whose famous Drake Equation seeks to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy.
Although the Arecibo message described humanity and our place in space in simple graphic terms, it was more a demonstration of human technological achievement. So too the “Beacon in the Galaxy,” which will also be coded in binary. The concept, published as a pre-print, has been submitted to the Journal of Galaxies.
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