Communicating Aliens!
What happened when humanity tried to talk to the little green men? Here’s the interesting story.
We, humans are a curious species, always trying to find something…more.
More than what we know, more than what we can see, more than what we have. Our search for more is endless and it isn’t just limited to our own surroundings, our own country, our own continent or for that matter our own planet.
Do you know that in our quest for more, humans have tried to contact the famed aliens more than once?
No kidding. Let’s first talk about the latest attempt. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has devised a binary-coded message that they want to send out across the galaxy in the hopes of making contact with extraterrestrials. Before this lets look how the idea of talking to aliens originated.
Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.
The quest to talk to the green little men actually started more than a century ago. It started with an Austrian named Joseph Johann Von Littrow. If you’re wondering how did a 19th century astronomer want to contact aliens, surely they didn’t have the technolgy back then…you’re right.
They didn’t have the technology, what Von Littrow proposed was something far different. He wanted to burn the Sahara desert. His plan was to dig massive trenches of geometric patterns in the Sahara, fill them with Kerosene oil and let it burn.
The idea was to have that huge blaze serve as a beacon announcing ‘we are here’.
In the 1960s, another attempt was made to contact aliens. The year 1962 saw Soviet scientists aim a radio transmitter at Venus and sent a message. As per the International Journal of Astrobiology, it was a largely symbolic message and the test run for a new planetary radar, i.e., technology that sends radio waves into space.
Just 12 years later, in 1974 another team of scientists sent a message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico towards a cluster of stars called Messier 13. This cluster is situated around 25,000 light years away from us.
This time the message was in binary code or the language of Maths, and Science and included a depiction of a human stick figure, DNA structure, a model of a carbon atom and a diagram of a telescope.
In 1977 two spacecraft; Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched with sound records; music, ambient sounds from our planet and 116 images of earth and the solar system.
And now its NASA’s turn to communicate with aliens.
The interplanetary message called “Beacon in the Galaxy” contains a vast range of information, including basic arithmetic and physics principles on communication, digital photographs of the human form, DNA elements, and time-stamped depiction of the solar system, Earth’s system. It concludes with an invitation to the aliens to respond by beaming back a response. But experts warn that it just might invite an alien invasion!
Now you must’ve heard about advertising in air, but have you heard about advertising in space?
In 2008, Doritos sent out its advertisement to another solar system outside our own, The intended target was Ursa Majoris Constellation situated 42 light-years away.
How would sci-fi fans fall behind when it comes to contacting aliens? In 2010 a message written in Star Trek’s Klingon language was beamed out inviting ET to attend a klingon opera in Holland.
This is still wandering in space waiting to be discovered.
While some experts say that the chances of reaching an alien civilisation are low if not impossible, others, including the late genius Stephen Hawing, belive it is a stupid undertaking inviting extraterrestrial invasion.
Time will tell what happens when we actually reach aliens. Let’s just hope it does more good than bad.
Source: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), NASA Astrobiology, Earthsky , Wion, JPL NASA.
