The search for extraterrestrial life is one that’s been ongoing seemingly since the dawn of time. Someday, plenty of scientists, researchers, and believers hope we’ll come in contact with life not from this planet. Should that happen, a new group of scientists hope they put a plan in place on how to respond to that first contact.
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Dr. John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St. Andrews hopes to gather a team of colleagues over the next few months in hopes of plotting a way on how to respond to aliens should they reach out to humanity first.
“Look at the mess we made when COVID hit. We’d be like headless chickens,” Elliott tells The Guardian. “We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage.”
Elliott hopes to gather researchers and affiliates from around the world to study signals and artifacts in hopes of creating the best possible way to respond.
“Up to now, the focus has been on the search for signals, but all along there’s been a need to know, what are we going to do with it? What next?” the scientist added. “We need strategies and scenarios in place to understand what we need to do and how to do it. It’s like the Scouts’ motto: be prepared.”
Conveniently enough, Elliott’s group has started to form after a separate group of scientists gathered together to craft another message to beam out amongst the cosmos in hopes it’d reach some form a life. Last April, Jonathan Jiang and a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were working on refining a message to beam some 13,000 light-years away near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
“We want to send a message in a bottle in the cosmic ocean, to say, ‘Hey, we are here,’” Jiang, Jet Propulsion Laboratory astrophysicist, toldย Live Science. “Even if we are not here some years later.”
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