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From serious efforts to declare our presence to extraterrestrial civilisations to daft publicity stunts, we have been sending messages to space for decades. What should a new postcard to the stars say?
Space
14 December 2022
Kyle Ellingson
WHEN Jonathan Jiang was a child, his father told him about a group of astronomers using a huge telescope to send a message into space, in the hope that aliens in some far-flung galaxy would hear it. “They shouldn’t do that,” Jiang remembers his dad saying. “The contents should be approved by the citizens of the Earth.”
The message, broadcast in 1974 from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, was headed for a cluster of stars in a galaxy called Messier 13, or M13. It will arrive in just under 25,000 years – though, of course, we don’t actually know if there are aliens there.
What we do know is that most stars in our galaxy host planets, and that many of these are potentially habitable. This means there is a chance that at least one of those billions of planets is home to intelligent life. Those odds are sufficient to suggest we should try to say hello. Or at least that is the rationale for sending targeted radio signals into space.
Over the past few decades, we have broadcast a mixed bag of signals, ranging from serious attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial civilisations to accidental broadcasts and daft publicity stunts. Put together, it makes for a slightly odd representation of us Earthlings. Given how much more we now know about the cosmos beyond our solar system, astronomers like Jiang, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, think it is time we beamed a new postcard to the stars.
You could say we …
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