What messages have we sent to aliens from Earth?

The possibility of intelligent life far from our planet is one of the most exciting aspects of the history of man’s quest for space exploration, and at the beginning of the 19th century, Austrian astronomer Joseph Johann von Letrow suggested that humans dig trenches made of large geometric patterns. in the Sahara desert, fill them with kerosene and set them on fire.

Von Letreux had never seen his idea bear fruit, however, long after coming up with his ambitious plan, scientists have not stopped their attempts to connect with life beyond Earth.

What messages have we sent to the aliens?

The radio carried out the quest to announce the existence of the Earth. In 1962, Soviet scientists aimed a radio transmitter at Venus and greeted the planet with a Morse code. This message, which is the first of its kind, consisted of three words: Mir (in Russian means “peace” or “world”), Lenin and SSSR (Latin alphabet for the name of the Soviet Union).

The message was seen as largely symbolic, according to a 2018 article in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

The message was, more than anything else, a test of a whole new planetary radar, a technology that sends radio waves into space, the primary purpose of which is to observe and map objects in the solar system.

The next attempt to reach the aliens was much more ambitious. In 1974, a team of scientists, including astronomers Frank Drake and Karl Sagan, sent a radio message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to Messier 13, a cluster of stars about 25,000 km Light Year away. .

The image, sent in binary code, contains a diagram of a man and a woman, the structure of the DNA double helix, a model of a carbon atom, and a diagram of a telescope.

“The message from the Arecibo Observatory attempted to provide insight into our identity as human beings in the language of mathematics and science,” said Douglas Vakocch, psychologist and president of Messaging Outraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) International, at Live Science.

Arecibo’s message was, literally, a bullet in the dark, and it would take about 25,000 light years to reach Messier 13, and by that point the star cluster would have shifted, according to the Department of astronomy from Cornell University.

And virtual aliens may still be able to detect the signal as it passes, because the intensity of the radio signals emanating from it is 10 million times the intensity of our sun’s radio signals (the sun emits a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, ultraviolet rays to radio), but that’s unlikely, he said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Research Institute for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

“It was, in a way, the strongest message,” Shostak told Live Science. “It’s like a giant billboard on the I-5 freeway in the United States, but it’s locked in a field somewhere.”

More recently, radio has been used to transmit everything from art to advertising, and in 2008 Doritos launched his own advertisement for a solar system in the constellation Ursa Major, about 42 light years away, according to an article published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

And in 2010, a message written in Klingon, a language used by the fictional creatures of the American television series “Star Trek”, invited “real” aliens to attend the Klingon opera in the Netherlands.

And not only did we rely on the radio to communicate, humans also launched a spacecraft containing artifacts from Earth, in hopes of being eventually ejected from interstellar space by intelligent life forms.

Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 to explore the outer extensions of our solar system and interstellar space. Each one carries a gold disc containing music and sounds surrounding the Earth and 116 images of our planet and our solar system.

The “Voyager” spacecraft is still traveling through interstellar space, waiting to be discovered, but the odds of it happening, according to Sherry Wells Jensen, a linguist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio specializing in intelligence extraterrestrial: “zero”.

“It was just a beautiful, poetic and courageous effort that really sums up our best, even if it made no sense in terms of actual communication,” she added.

Experts agree that the likelihood of any of these attempts reaching extraterrestrial civilizations is low, and this outcome depends, of course, on whether or not there is extraterrestrial life in our star system, but that life in question must listen carefully to the radio signals and understand enough of the math and science to explain Our messages, well, and the messages we sent tend to assume that these aliens feel the universe the same way we do: with l hearing and sight.