Reply to Oxford University Scholars The British raised the alarm about the plans NASA To broadcast location data and other information into space, they warn that this effort may have severe unintended consequences.
The subject of the controversy is “Beacon in the Galaxy” (BITG), a data broadcast by a team of researchers led by NASA aimed at welcoming “outside intelligence.” planet earth“.
The US space agency wants to transmit the signal from SETI’s Allen Telescope in California and China’s 500-meter aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST).
It will include information such as the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the time-bound location of the Solar System in the Milky Way, digital images of humans, and a call for the planets to respond.
Anders Sandberg, senior researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), argued that such broadcasting could be risky. He said that in the unlikely event that a space civilization receives the message, the response might not be just a friendly greeting.
In an article published on Sunday, Sandberg told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that the search for aliens had “a factor of fluctuation. A lot of people refuse to take anything about it seriously, which is a shame because these are important things.”
Another FHI scientist at Oxford, Toby Ord, suggested that a public discussion should take place before signals were sent to aliens.
He added that even listening to incoming messages could be dangerous, as they could be used to trap earthlings.
“These risks are small, but they are not well understood and not yet well managed,” he said.
He insisted that there is no scientific consensus on the ratio Peaceful Civilizations To hostile around the galaxy. “Given the downside can be much greater than the upside, this does not seem to me like a good position to take active steps toward connectivity,” he said.
Weaker signals have been transmitted to space in the past using earlier technologies, such as the Arecibo message sent in 1974. Russian scientists made a series of such broadcasts, called Cosmic Calls, in 1999 and 2003.
Scientists at BITG have speculated that alien species that have advanced enough to communicate across the universe are “very likely to have achieved high levels of cooperation among themselves and thus learn the importance of peace and cooperation”. Canadian futurist George Dvorsky rejected this theory and described it as an “old trope”, saying he could think of a “range of scenarios” in which the existence of Aliens with malicious inclinations.