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Space Science

Scientists Hope To Broadcast DNA and Earth's Location For Curious Aliens (theguardian.com) 134

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Beacon of Galaxy message could be sent into heart of Milky Way, where life is deemed most likely to exist. From a report: "Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed," the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once mused, "if they're here, I want to know about them." Driven by the same mindset, a Nasa-led team of international scientists has developed a new message that it proposes to beam across the galaxy in the hope of making first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials. The interstellar missive, known as the Beacon in the Galaxy, opens with simple principles for communication, some basic concepts in maths and physics, the constituents of DNA, and closes with information about humans, the Earth, and a return address should any distant recipients be minded to reply.

The group of researchers, headed by Dr Jonathan Jiang at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, says that with technical upgrades the binary message could be broadcast into the heart of the Milky Way by the Seti Institute's Allen Telescope Array in California and the 500-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China. In a preliminary paper, which has not been peer reviewed, the scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the centre of the Milky Way -- a region deemed most promising for life to have emerged.

"Humanity has, we contend, a compelling story to share and the desire to know of others -- and now has the means to do so," the scientists write. The message, if it ever leaves Earth, would not be the first. The Beacon in the Galaxy is loosely based on the Arecibo message sent in 1974 from an observatory of the same name in Puerto Rico. That targeted a cluster of stars about 25,000 light years away, so it will not arrive any time soon. Since then, a host of messages have been beamed into the heavens including an advert for Doritos and an invitation, written in Klingon, to a Klingon Opera in The Hague.
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Scientists Hope To Broadcast DNA and Earth's Location For Curious Aliens More

Scientists Hope To Broadcast DNA and Earth's Location For Curious Aliens

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  • Story to Tell? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:37PM (#62457322)

    Storytellers always think they have the best story. I would love to hear it.

    From the big point of view, I'm not sure we are much removed from Apes yet.

    Who's DNA are they sending? It would be really funny if they all showed up in costumes that looked like that person, thinking that was the information we sent them so that we'd know how to look so we didn't blast them from orbit.

    --
    We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. - William Shatner

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      There are an awful lot of assumptions these blinking beacon folks are making about the ability of a completely alien civilization to decode our message. It's preposterous. The best we could hope for is to communicate that we have a basic understanding of simple mathematics, and even that's a stretch. For all we know, things like prime numbers don't mean anything to them.

      DNA? They've got to be out of their minds. For all we know, it's unique to earth and some other mechanism is common to the rest of th

      • DNA? They've got to be out of their minds.

        DNA has some very useful properties and it forms easily in primordial soup. There is a reasonable chance that alien life is based on DNA. But they may use different bases. Researchers have replicated DNA with up to 8 bases [sciencedaily.com] instead of the standard 4.

        • Or... perhaps they take it as a warning about a biological infection (why assume all intelligence is biological) and dispatch some kill-bots to clean up the infection

          *Alert* hegemonizing swarm detected in spiral arm, all warnings destroy immediately

          Hopefully, "immediately" might span the entire course of civilization, but I, for one, support hiding out until we are more capable, and harder to wipe out

          • ...I, for one, support hiding out until we are more capable, and harder to wipe out

            it to late for that. we have been broadcasting unencrypted signal into space for over a century now starting with radio and moving on to television signals soon everything pretty much will be encrypted and look like noise but we have already announced ourselves to the universe. the space race was televised so anyone out there knows we have extra-planetary capabilities (suck for us we actually regressed on that and are only now catching back up to the 60s level off space flight (in many ways the space shuttl

      • Re:Story to Tell? (Score:5, Informative)

        by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:57PM (#62457576)

        I think a lot of assumptions are made about the frequency of intelligent life too.

        The universe is likely too vast for us to be the ONLY intelligent civilization around right now, but if there are currently say, 1 million active, intelligent civilizations in the visible universe that would still put them at like - 1 per 100,000 galaxies to 1 per 2 million galaxies (depending on which estimate you go with for # of galaxies in the observable universe).

        Just due to scale both of the following statements can be true:

        1. The universe has many, many intelligent civilizations.
        2. Detection, let alone communication, is virtually impossible.

      • When they designed the golden record on the Voyager probes they sat down a bunch of industry-leading leading and gave them a draft of the record with no explanation whatsoever, other than it had been discovered. It was a test to prove that there was some chance of them figuring out its inscriptions and how to read its data. They were able to do it, as I recall, but the thought that went into the instructions was extensive.

        Give industry professionals DNA data in some binary format with no explanation and the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Who's DNA are they sending? It would be really funny if they all showed up in costumes that looked like that person

      They'll monitor our TV and send silly game-show hosts with odd hair and facial tints because they won't get all the details right ... Oh, wait a second...

      • Who's DNA are they sending? It would be really funny if they all showed up in costumes that looked like that person

        They'll monitor our TV and send silly game-show hosts with odd hair and facial tints because they won't get all the details right ... Oh, wait a second...

        Funny? You think sending a bluefin of homo sapiens to civilisation in the galaxy is smart? The are planning to give our species' enemies the perfect tool to deveop at virus (etc) that will exterminate us. The least they could have done is paid for a falcon heavy launch to send the transmitter out of the solar system before it starts broadcasting.

        • The least they could have done is paid for a falcon heavy launch to send the transmitter out of the solar system before it starts broadcasting.

          that wouldn't help they could triangulate its vector based timing of the Doppler shift of the signal as it flys through space relative to them and then backtrack it to us, or just listen to the last century of broadcast signals we have sent out in the form of radio and television signals and compare it to the compiled dna sequence and go oh its you.

      • Would be a good way to monetize egomaniacs. Highest bidder's DNA is shot through the cosmos to be admired by future alien civilizations.

        • > good way to monetize egomaniacs. Highest bidder's DNA is shot through the cosmos...

          No no no, we don't want the galaxy filled with our biggest egomaniacs. One is fucking enough! Imagine a million of "them", aaaHHggg!

    • Why do I feel like this is (or will be) the prologue for a movie where we get invaded by aliens?

    • Who's DNA are they sending? It would be really funny if they all showed up in costumes that looked like that person, thinking that was the information we sent them so that we'd know how to look so we didn't blast them from orbit.

      Lobsters. [antipope.org]

      Seriously, it's worth the read.

      Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?"

      "They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted – part of their contract – that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?"

    • You barely missed a Hugo nomination...

    • I wonder if the message mentions that we're covered in fat and probably fry up real nice?

  • Do you want Ants? Cause this is how you get ants? Giant man eating space ants!

  • Not their decision (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:41PM (#62457334)

    I don't know if there's anyone else there to receive the message. But suppose there is. Thus the consequences might affect us all. Then it's up to humanity in its entirety, not a bunch of "scientist" tinkerers with nothing better to do, to decide whether we want to put out the calling card or not.

    I for me say no.

    • Compared to all the other RF we're emitting, the signal from these scientists is insignificant.

      • The vast majority of RF emissions are directed at the earth, and/or powerful enough to go anywhere on an interstellar scale.

        https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]

      • We've sent enough TV into the heavens to warn off all the space aliens that either don't want to eat us or actually want to meet the Kardasians. I'm trying to work out which set of aliens would be worse.
  • "Scientists Hope To Broadcast DNA and Earth's Location For HUNGRY Aliens" I've seen lots of bad sci-fi movies which makes me fully qualified to say: this will end badly. Just kidding, to hell with it, do it!
  • The aliens now have everything they need to drop a missile with a virus to wipe us out before they bother to come themselves. Nice planet that earth, get rid of those pest humans first though and we can make it a great vacation destination planet.
    • wars are fought over resources. If they were advanced enough to drop a missile on us they're advanced enough to mine asteroids. And there's no shortage of habitable worlds *if* you can get to them.

      Literally the only reason for aliens to come here is tourism. Worst case scenario are some intergalactic Karens yelling at waiters.

      • wars are fought over resources.

        Wars are competitions. What competition is about is vast and varied.

        If they were advanced enough to drop a missile on us they're advanced enough to mine asteroids. And there's no shortage of habitable worlds *if* you can get to them.

        Literally the only reason for aliens to come here is tourism. Worst case scenario are some intergalactic Karens yelling at waiters.

        Worst case scenario humans are weeds and alien ships are stocked with this... [ortho.com]

      • Biology isn't like other resources. If you set every single atom in the visible universe to the task of computing simply calculating the protein conformations of proteins no longer than those observed in nature you would exceed the life of the universe by orders of magnitude before you ever got into the single-digit percentages of completing the calculations. Biological diversity is and likely always will be the most scarce commodity in all of existence.

      • Wars are also fought over religion. My god is better than your god, you're not following the correct grandson of the Prophet, not that Prophet, the other one, indulgences are holy/blasphemy, etc etc.

        If you can get here resources are not the reason you would come. At least I don't think so. Unless they badly needed something scarce that could only concentrate in earth-like planet with a hydrothermal system, like zinc or barium. An insane need for a gigaton of calcium carbonate?

        I'm not coming up with ant res

    • TV programs have sent more than enough information on human DNA already, if in weaker broadcasts. The genie is out of the bottle. The cat is also out of the bag, but not yet amongst the pigeons.

  • Broadcast NOTHING, may eat or conquer us (Score:3)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:48PM (#62457360) Journal

    "Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed," the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once mused, "if they're here, I want to know about them."

    The context for this is hypnosis-based reports from alleged abductees who pretty much described the "grays" as short, dour and sexually obsessed. The sexual part seems to be related to their focus on breeding human-alien hybrids, or at least re-engineered humans.

    If the reports are to be believed, the aliens expect humans will soon trigger an apocalypse, at which time the aliens will take over and run things with the new improved better disciplined "version" of humans in charge, who then will need to breed quickly to take over any left-over "ordinary" humans. Although, the interpretations and details are murky. Odd stuff.

    • If the reports are to be believed, the aliens expect humans will soon trigger an apocalypse, at which time the aliens will take over and run things with the new improved better disciplined "version" of humans in charge, who then will need to breed quickly to take over any left-over "ordinary" humans.

      No matter what they send, "Keeping up with the Kardashians" will get there first.

      We're doomed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        > "Keeping up with the Kardashians" [broadcasts] will get there first

        Then booty-obsessed aliens will arrive first, from the constellation Bootes I would expect.

    • So much for Hawkings statement about historically, when one technologically advanced civilization encounters a much lesser technologically advanced civilization, it does not bode well for the lesser civilization. The intent was observing without blasting a beacon to be dominated.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Even though the Aztecs were "conquered", their progeny lives on via Spaniard + native-American interbreeding. Thanks (or unthanks*) to the Catholic Church's anti-birth-control stance, they are pretty numerous, actually. That's Montezuma's real revenge, and it's driving the orange guy nuts.

        My point is that being "conquered" isn't necessarily the end of humanity.

        * Depending on your point of view

        • Well my point is without pre-knowledge, the risks outweigh the reward. For all we know we could all be forced to work in the spice mines on kessel. Its better to observe silently than blast a beacon. We verywell could be the polish jews of 1937 in this galaxy.

          • Or maybe they just won't even bother with us...

            "Well, yes, the humans. The hillbillies of the galaxy." - Ildis Kitan

    • Not to worry, we already know they will come here To Serve Man.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Imagine if these aliens receive our DNA and attempt to hybridize it with their species. And the experiment goes amuck. Producing a being that, under normal circumstances looks just like them, scales, tentacles and all. But when triggered, morphs into an entity resembling Natasha Henstridge. Who proceeds to attempt to reproduce without limit, replacing the native species on their planet with this abomination.

  • Dark Forest Theory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Malenfrant ( 781088 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:48PM (#62457362)
    I thought these people were supposed to be smart. This is an incredibly stupid thing to do. The most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox is that any species stupid enough to advertise their presence has been wiped out. It only takes one xenophobic species out of potentially Billions. These fools need stopping.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      I mean, by the time it reaches anywhere, we should have been gone for very long, its not like we should be afraid of becoming part of Flatland.

    • We do not need any alien species to destroy us. We are more than capable and entirely willing to do it ourselves long before anything gets any past of future message from us.

      "More News at 6, 10, and 11."

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cedral ( 1023683 )

      Ninja'd. I came here to say exactly this. It's easy to imagine how this could come back to bite us in the ass but not so easy to see how it could profit us. Doesn't seem like sound reasoning at all.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xonen ( 774419 )

      I thought these people were supposed to be smart. This is an incredibly stupid thing to do. The most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox is that any species stupid enough to advertise their presence has been wiped out. It only takes one xenophobic species out of potentially Billions. These fools need stopping.

      That statement, although i totally agree, makes assumptions. An alternate is the zoo hypothesis, and combined with some active engineering, scientists just do what they are sort-of programmed to do. In the bigger scheme of things, history repeats. Maybe our society and development is very or reasonably predictable. And we just upload our latest research efforts to the intergalactic cloud.

      Just saying, there's (plenty) alternate explanations for the Fermi paradox, and so far they seem to avoid us to draw any

    • Any Xenophobic species with the capability to travel here and receive this message would be able to detect us and wipe us out with or without that information.

    • I think I already saw that movie.

      Wasn't it called, "attack of the clones" ?

    • Yes, the dark forest theory is incredibly stupid. If there are aliens that can wage war on an interstellar scale, you can be absolutely sure that they have already detected our presence whether we "advertise" it or not. Humanity is right now on the verge of being able to detect life on planets orbiting other stars, but we're nowhere near interstellar travel. By the time we achieve the latter, we'll have a very good idea of what every planet within hundreds of lightyears is like. In short, the "dark forest"

    • If it takes 100,000 years for aliens to come then human kind might have advanced technologically so the idea that we'll become subjects of a massively more advanced race is not a given. Maybe it will be the reverse.

  • And I for one welcome our new alien overlords. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @02:49PM (#62457366)

    Having our DNA ahead of time will allow them to develop more efficent bio weaponry so we can be eliminates quietly while preserving the rest of the natual habitat.

    • Having our DNA ahead of time will allow them to develop tastier recipes. Sure they'll have the "Beyond Human" product vat grown before they ever taste the real thing, but there will always be alien billionaires ready to flex on each other by serving nothing but the freshest, most tender humans delivered direct from Earth each day.
  • In the final months of his life, but I can't recall his reasons.
    • He said historically, when one technologically advanced civilization encounters a lesser civilization, it has fared poorly for the lesser civilization. There is no reason to assume other species will behave differently without evidence to the contrary. Safer to assume the prior.

  • I'm all for broadcasting a "we are here" message to try to catch the attention of any nearby species, but what possible benefit is there in broadcasting our DNA? That'd be a *huge* amount of useless data.

    Ah, a closer reading says that's NOT what they're doing - they're broadcasting "the constituents of DNA" - which I believe translates to "our heritable information matrix is built out of these amino acids", probably including the basic structure. Which could be incredibly interesting information for any s

  • Look, I know that we havenâ(TM)t discovered any sentient outside of earth (at least publicly). But why risk letting the galaxy know? Just because we havenâ(TM)t found any sentient life doesnâ(TM)t mean there isnâ(TM)t any. And if there is sentient life how do we know that said life wonâ(TM)t see this message and sent a armada to squish us like ants? Or send a envoy to welcome us to the greater galaxy? There are a lot of ifs flying around, too many unanswered questions too many what

    • Re:Really? (Score:4, Funny)

      by HanzoSpam ( 713251 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:34PM (#62457518)

      Because the scientists are all Enlightened liberals, and they know that, of course, any other intelligent species must also be Enlightened liberals, who would never, ever think of doing such a thing. Trust the scientists, they're never wrong.

      • On the flip side, all of us are convinced that aliens will be warmongering tribalists since, well, we're all a bunch of warmongering tribalists.
  • All life survived by competition for space and resources due to evolutionary factors. Therefore, we can expect with almost inductive certainty that aliens will be hostile and extremely dangerous. Even contact with alien single celled organisms or nano-replicators, if the alien is a form of machine intelligence, could contaminate our biological environments in ways leading to the end of the human species. Thus, sending out locational and vulnerable information is almost certainly a misguided idea. Also, it p

    • On the other hand, humans evolved in a highly competitive environment but are largely cooperative and social. As a species develops complex communication mechanism cooperation in social groups evolves naturally and non-zero-sum interactions contribute to overall fitness.

      If we discovered life on another planet our first response would not be Protein!

    • Many forms of life survive via forms of symbiosis between species, and cooperation amongst members of species. Heck, even our cells are examples of a form of symbiosis, although you could debate the origin. So your premise is incomplete.

  • Xindi (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bustinbrains ( 6800166 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:09PM (#62457444)

    Did no one at NASA watch Star Trek: Enterprise prior to coming up with this idea?

    Now I'm aware that a LOT of Trek fans don't like ST:Enterprise, but there was a whole episode during the season 3 Xindi saga where the Reptilians attempt to create a blood-type based bioweapon in Detroit designed to completely wipe out Earth's population. So now we're going to give unknown aliens with unknown intent super easy access to human DNA. Watching Star Trek and being able to quote lines from it, even the bad ones, should absolutely be a prerequisite to conducting ANY scientific endeavor to identify potential issues in advance that might affect the whole planet. Maybe throw a little Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, and even Jurassic Park in that mix as well.

    • Lizards? That's V not ST. According to some they are already here, so a beacon won't help. Presumably there is a beacon beaming out "property of planet Zarg". Maybe that is what those "number stations" are :).

  • Uh huh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:11PM (#62457452)

    The core of the galaxy is 30,000 to 40,000 years away, so figure 60-80,000 years before we get the return message "unsubscribe".

    • Yeah, the number of paranoid relies in this thread are very interesting. With our current technology we most likely wouldn't get any sort of reply for many, many millennia.

      Then since our science says you can't travel faster than light it'll be just as long before anyone shows up on our doorstep. I'd like to think that we'll be long gone by then...

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:19PM (#62457476)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • DNA is nice (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday April 18, 2022 @03:28PM (#62457500)

    That way, they can breed us and eat us without having to get up from the galactic couch.

    • +1. Indeed. They can make people from the DNA and then have their evil way with them.

      Would make an excellent plot for a horror movie. Or maybe a Black Mirror.

  • This seems an awful lot like broadcasting a source of fleshly delicacies.

  • Just tell your potential unknown adversaries across all of existence how to synthesize bioweapons which target you. Someone lock these clowns up.
    • I don't want to interrupt your tactical considerations but there's still a thing called "light speed".
    • Anyone that can travel 40,000 light years won't need our DNA to wipe us out in the blink of an eye.
      • If you set every single atom in the visible universe to the task of computing simply calculating the protein conformations of proteins no longer than those observed in nature you would exceed the life of the universe by orders of magnitude before you ever got into the single-digit percentages of completing the calculations. Biological diversity is and likely always will be the most scarce commodity in all of existence. No alien invader is going to use blunt instruments to wipe us out, the biodiversity on E
  • This can't be legal. I can't believe that information isn't copyrighted. Time for a copyright "reform"! Think of all the poor rightsholders who won't get fairly compensated if we do not act now.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Haven't they seen those documentaries Independence Day & Mars Attacks? Do they want us to go through that all over again?
  • Consider what typically happens when a more technologically advanced civilization meets a less advanced one. It usually ends badly for the less advanced one.

    The risk / reward seems insanely low on this one.

    When the guys on the ships meet the guys on the shore, it usually ends very badly for the guys on the shore . We need to be the ones on the ships.

  • the scientists recommend sending the message to a dense ring of stars near the centre of the Milky Way -- a region deemed most promising for life to have emerged

    I could not post a reference backing that, but I thought that galaxy's edges would be better for life, with less chances of been wiped by a collision ot a gamma burst. Do I remember badly, or did consensus change?

  • The far away aliens recieved our plea for help in eliminating the invasive species we send the DNA of and has sent an "antidote" that will be arriving in due time.

  • We assume they are benevolent, but our own example shows humanity, but for the unlikely one-two chance or discovering a largely open continent and throwing a unique revolution, restricting dictatorial powers, rather than the all too tempting taking them for yourself, humanity would be wall to wall dictatorship.

    Do not expect galactic civilization to be otherwise.

  • What would aliens, with space travel technology, need from Earth? Nothing! It can't be water, there is plenty of water in the universe. Just within our solar system there are plenty of comets with water. Also, it can't be food they need. Earth's animals may taste OK, but aliens can surely synthesize food/proteins (assuming they even use proteins) from the elements found on any other planet. Presumably aliens would be able to utilize nuclear fusion or solar power for the energy needed to synthesize food give

  • More idiots who think they have found a gravy train.

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