A Kentucky town has come up with a unique way to boost tourism in the Blue Grass State: inviting aliens who possibly live in a star system 40 light years away.
Lexington scientists, along with a clever advertising team from VisitLex, sent an encoded infrared laser message to TRAPPIST-1, a star with at least seven exoplanets believed to be potentially hospitable to life.
About 235 billion miles from Lexington and Earth, the message won’t reach its destination for 38 years, 262 days, 7 hours, 9 minutes and… 42 seconds, according to a countdown running in the VisitLex website at the time of writing this article. but scientists consider that this duration really works in their favor.
“We’re targeting the TRAPPIST-1 system because we could get a response in someone’s lifetime if there’s someone there watching,” said Dr. Robert Lodder, a University of Kentucky computer engineering professor with extensive credentials in astrochemistry. astrobiology and SETI Programs (Search for Extraterrestrial Life).
The message is an encoded bitmap, or a simple image drawn in pixels, containing information about the Earth. VisitLEX
Dubbed “the world’s first interstellar tourism campaign” by VisitLex, the message turned to a team of Kentucky linguists and scientists (including science fiction experts) to compile the transmission transmitted to the distant star.
The message is an encoded bitmap, or a simple image plotted in pixels, containing information about Earth, including prime numbers, the periodic elements that are the building blocks of life in our corner of the universe, along with representations of humans and horses.
Also included in the message are the molecular structures of elements of Lexington’s favorite export, bourbon, and also dopamine, “because Lexington is fun,” VisitLex noted.
The kit also included a pastoral scene of the Kentucky hills, the message “Visit Lexington” written in plain English, and a recording of Lexington blues master Tee Dee Young crying on his electric guitar.
The message was sent using a coded infrared laser. VisitLEX
“Of all the things we’ve been broadcasting into space, why not a positive, friendly message?” said Dr. Brenna Byrd, a linguistics professor at the University of Kentucky.
The message and its transmission were approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, according to VisitLex.
While it may be the first time a space travel brochure has been released, the message is far from the first time humans have sent messages to extraterrestrial life that might be listening in the cosmos.
The Voyager deep space probes launched in 1977 contained identical golden phonograph records intended to give intelligent aliens who might encounter them an idea of what life on Earth looks and sounds like.
Voyager’s Golden Record was intended to give aliens an idea of what life was like on Earth. POT
They included music from around the world, recordings in different languages, sounds of nature, signals that can be translated into more than 100 images of life on Earth, a map indicating the location of the Sun compared to nearby celestial objects, and a series of symbols intended to help decipher the record.
Currently about 15 billion miles from Earth (about 0.006% of the way to TRAPPIST), Voyager I has penetrated deeper into space than any other man-made object.
Another signal sent into deep space is the Arecibo message, which was transmitted from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974.
Like the message sent from Kentucky, the Arecibo message used a pixel-based format to communicate humanity’s number system, symbols of local elements, representations of our DNA strands, a map of our solar system, and a representation of what humans are like, among others. other details.
The Arecibo message was transmitted from Puerto Rico in 1974. Arne Nordmann
That message was sent to the globular cluster Messier 13, about 25,000 light years from Earth, and will take about the same number of years to arrive.
No matter how well-intentioned efforts to establish contact with otherworldly civilizations may be, many scientists have warned against it.
Stephen Hawking, for example, advised against it in a 2010 Discovery Channel documentary.
“If aliens visit us, the result would be very similar to when Columbus landed in America, which was not good at all for the Native Americans,” said the physicist.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn