In an attempt to contact aliens, a team of scientists has set up a radio transmission to contact some aliens, NBC News reports. No, this isn’t the beginning of every intergalactic sci-fi movie gone wrong—or at least hopefully it isn’t.
In the Norwegian city of Tromsø, a scientific initiative has organized an example of messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), in the hopes to find any potential neighbors in our solar system. The broadcast would target Luyten’s Star, or GJ 273, which is 12 light-years away (but it’s the closest star system that has an Earth-like planet). Because this red dwarf planet is still pretty far away, Tromsø will likely wait at least 20 years for a potential response.
The president of METI, Douglas Vakoch, explains to Newsweek that the reason many people might be leery about contacting aliens due to a phenomenon in cognitive psychology, called availability heuristic. Because we don’t have much experience with this interstellar unknown, we create mental shortcuts, which give us “examples” that allow us to access the risks involved.
In this particular example, we’re messaging aliens. Most people haven’t met an alien in their lifetime, so the other readily available examples we have about this topic are from movies like E.T. and Aliens. With our limited judgment (because nobody’s really an expert on befriending aliens), best-case scenario, our messaging sesh with a potential alien could pan out like E.T. (TBH is pretty crappy for the alien). Or a freaking Xenomorph finds a way to hitchhike to Earth — and we all know how that ends up. If you’re an optimist, then maybe your availability heuristic could lead you to believe a planet of Ewoks is eagerly waiting for our transmission.
Regardless, our judgment is a bit skewed from all the bad press movie directors promote about aliens. (After all, aliens are humans too. Not really, but they still have rights!)
Nevertheless, there’s still controversy about the way we’re contacting aliens. After all, METI is an unconventional method to contact aliens (which is already an unconventional idea in itself). As Dr. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, explains in his NBC News article, the tradition way to contact aliens has been through the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). This essentially means that scientists typically create a “ping” to notify aliens that we exist and then wait for them to draft a response.
However, Vakoch’s will be sending a message focused on a very specific part of another solar system, which Dr. Shostak explains is “a long shot.” Granted, trying to make contact with life in a different part of the universe is a long shot in the first place — seeing as we’re assuming that these potential aliens are at least as technologically advanced as us, and are therefore capable of accessing our transmission.
Nevertheless, what exactly does Vakoch’s message to the aliens entail? Wired writes that Vakoch’s team included music and math in their transmission (hopefully GJ 273’s population isn’t offended by geometry or binary numbers).
Even if it goes down more than 20 years from now, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum will be ready for a fight (or maybe a Predator will take pity on us). Hopefully we’ll just meet a chill extraterrestrial pen pal and eventually set-up a sleep over (complete with dress-up time.)