Researchers Preparing to Send New Message to Extraterrestrials

48 years ago, scientists began broadcasting a message into the depths of space, hoping to contact alien life in an attempt to establish communication. Known as the Arecibo message, scientists used binary data that, when interpreted, formed an image of a human, numbers, and various science-related imagery. Now, a new generation of scientists think it's time to update the message currently being broadcast, with hopes of sending it even further into space.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have designed a new message they want to send as a radio signal to an area 13,000 light-years away from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers have previously concluded if alien life were to exist, that area may be the most hospitable.

"We want to send a message in a bottle in the cosmic ocean, to say, 'Hey, we are here,'" Jonathan Jiang, Jet Propulsion Laboratory astrophysicist, told Live Science. "Even if we are not here some years later."

While using the Arecibo message as a basis, the message has been updated so as to provide a more accurate location of Earth. The Arecibo message was broadcast from a telescope Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, but the telescope itself was taken offline in 2020 after a support failure destroyed its infrastructure.

The message also happens to include a timestamp, so any aliens potentially receiving the message would know when it was sent. If all goes to plan, the new group would broadcast their message from one of two telescopes: the Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in Guizhou, China or the Allen Telescope Array in California.

"It would probably be better, since they're going to listen to us anyway, to send a positive message," message co-designer Stuart Taylor also told the website. "We're kind of the chimpanzee 'fighting' civilization. Some other civilization just may have a basically more peaceful personality, like bonobos do." 

Jiang and his team released an updated study with their plans earlier this month.

"An updated, binary-coded message has been developed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy. The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System's time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth's surface," the study's abstract reads.

It adds, "The message concludes with digitized images of the human form, along with an invitation for any receiving intelligences to respond. Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed. These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo's legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth's technological civilization."