Posted 01.28.2011 at 3:45 pm
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Allen Telescope Array
The Allen Telescope Array is designed to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Since the first binary code sent from Puerto Rico in 1974, our messages to aliens have been increasingly complicated and cryptic, possibly so much that extraterrestrials won’t get what we’re saying.
A trio of astrophysicists from the US and France hope to change that by building an extraterrestrial messaging protocol, so any spacebound communiqué could be easily understood.
A METI protocol — messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence — would include several factors, including signal encoding, message length and message content, according to Dimitra Atri, an astronomer at the University of Kansas, and his colleagues. They suggest using two specific wavelengths for transmission: 1.42 GHz or 4.46 GHz, which are commonly observed in nature and relatively easy to capture, in case the ETs only have “modest technical capabilities.” They also recommend establishing a dedicated transmission beacon to conduct regular broadcasts.
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Science, Rebecca Boyle, aliens, extraterrestrials, long distance service, radio communications, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, seti institute, space explorationBut Atri et. al’s most interesting critique is that to date, our messages have been overly anthropocentric. It’s a fair point: Some nine-limbed creature in the Gliese system probably wouldn’t understand the human nuances behind a message containing side-by-side images of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, meant to signify good and evil. Heck, they may not have the technical abilities required to process the data into an image at all.
“Given that we know very little about the nature of extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist, we are likely to increase the probability of us successfully communicating to them if we use a message that the recipient is likely to understand,” the authors say.
To ensure this, they propose a worldwide test of the new METI protocol, figuring that if people across cultures can understand it, a basic ET might, too. International users could create and exchange messages through an interactive website, following the protocol to create a crowdsourced ideal message.
“An effective message to extraterrestrials should at least be understandable by humans, and releasing the protocol for testing will allow us to improve the protocol and develop potential messages,” the authors write.
Their paper, posted this week to the physics arXiv, has been accepted for publication in the journal Space Policy.
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a good test would be to release the 'code' onto the internet (without its meaning) and see how quickly it's decrypted
lets just hope that they don't translate it into "Global diner, all you can eat, free doggie bags, open 24hrs."
they might not use radio frequencies at all, though. they could use entanglement for communication, for example.
Technology doesn't work that way. Any species that got to quantum entanglement would have to have radio first. They'd hear us. (Also: any such advanced civilization would have radio telescopes even if they never *did* use radio for communication.)
The aliens already speak English.
How about sending out the numeric signal of PI? 3.1415 I would think that mathematics would be the same anywhere in the universe.
The odds of another civilization being at our level of technological development must be astronomical,and one culture may be still living in caves,and another is hundreds of thousands or millions of years more advanced than we are.
If they are the latter,we would be regarded as insects,and who bothers to communicate with bugs?
"If they are the latter,we would be regarded as insects,and who bothers to communicate with bugs?"
Alien entomologists? (-:
@ Dirk Mcbratney; How biased that is. What you forget is that the device, radio, is our adaptation to manipulate what we cannot see, hear , or touch. Who can say they see in our spectrum, hear in our spectrum, or can only discern tactile input of frequency the way we do? It is almost an absolute fact that what we can hear, feel, or see fully, they cannot, or vice-versa. And so it goes...We might meet a race that has been getting headaches from our space noise since 1938 got to their galaxy; and our first meeting could in fact be THEIR idea of a radio that hits us with a frequency that kills every mammal on the planet by putting total alpha wave in our heads till we die from forgetting to breathe or dehydration or something.
they might exist in many more dimensions than we do, and have a form of communication that relies on this higher dimension.
Sorry if I don't drink the kool-aide of 'the believers'....but shouldn't there be some evidence of real life aliens out there before we start wasting money and time and energy on such stuff?
Love and math are the universal languages.
At bagpipes: Finding them is our ultimate goal. As long as we are alone we will continue to kill each other. We are lonely. When we find them, money will be out of the picture, problems solved.
That's a whole 'nuther kind of kool-aide.
I believe the price we pay in the attempt to find other intelligent life out-weighs the price of missing an opportunity to find them.