“The significance of a finding that there are other beings who share this universe with us would be absolutely phenomenal,” astrophysicist and prolific science communicator Carl Sagan once said of the scientific search for ET. “It would be an epochal event in human history.”
A team led by scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have proposed a mission to beam information into the cosmos. The proposal, called “Beacon in the Galaxy”, is led by Jonathan Jiang from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, the team has posted a preliminary paper detailing the proposal. By outfitting the massive Allen Telescope Array at the SETI Institute in California and the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China, a message encoded in binary could be beamed throughout the Milky Way.
It would reveal the Earth’s location to any intelligent ET civilization within the galaxy that happen upon the message, assuming they’re listening. Some scientists are worried that this could reveal our location to hostile civilizations while others argue that a lot of information will be lost in translation.
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