Say Hello to Aliens: Scientists to Contact Nearest Earth-like Exoplanet

By Tarun Mittal, CP Contributor Wednesday, December 28, 2016

After decades of scanning the skies in vain for messages from extraterrestrial life forms, scientists have decided to send some of their own in the hopes of establishing first contact with alien beings.

Scientists of the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) organization are preparing to send transmissions to Proxima b, the closest Earth-like planet outside our Solar System. The exoplanet is named so because it orbits around the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri which, at 4.25 light years away, is the closest star to the Sun.

The members of the San Francisco-based organization intend to build or buy a powerful deep-space transmitter that can send messages with conversation-starters to the rocky planet via radio or laser signals.

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The project, which should be operational by the end of 2018, will be the first instance of repeated and intentional messages being broadcasted to the same stars over months and years from Earth.

"This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship," said Douglas Vakoch, president of METI and former director of Interstellar Message Composition at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View (SETI). "If we want to start an exchange over the course of many generations, we want to learn and share information," he told The Mercury Times.

Haven't we already done this?

This is not the first time an endeavor with the aim of contacting E.T life has been proposed. In the 1970s, NASA formulated a mission known as Project Cyclops with the hopes of broadcasting information almost 1,000 light years into space using a network of radio telescopes. The project, however, was shelved due to a lack of funding.

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft carried a message in the form of a gold plaque to space in the early 1970s. More recently, we've sent arithmetic, concerts of Vivaldi and Gershwin, and the Beatles song "Across the Universe." Whether these messages were intercepted by any lifeforms remains unknown.

METI, a non-profit organization, is looking towards crowd-funding to obtain the funds – an estimated $1 million per year – it requires to run the transmitter, according to Science Alert. The organization, founded last year, has detailed a comprehensive strategic plan for the next three years to make the mission a reality and it will be conducting workshops in Paris and St. Louis to attract support.

The researchers at METI will have to figure out what the messages should say and deliberate if other lifeforms have developed the same mathematical laws and scientific theories required to decipher them.

Is talking to aliens a good idea?

While the prospect of conversing with aliens seems an exciting prospect, the idea has its fair share of detractors. Physicist Mark Buchanan recently published a paper in the Nature Physics journal arguing that broadcasting messages into spaces is just "searching for trouble." He added: "We have almost zero idea of whether aliens are likely to be dangerous."

Stephen Hawking, arguably the most famous and respected physicist on Earth, agrees. Hawking is firmly against the idea of trying to communicate with distant alien civilizations that are probably far more advanced than we are. He argues that such lifeforms may view humanity as inferior and weak beings perfect to conquer.

But the experts at METI remain undeterred by the opposition and insist that the benefits of reaching out into space far outweigh the risks.

"Perhaps for some civilizations... we need to take the initiative to make first contact," METI president Vakoch writes in Nature Physics.

"The role of scientists is to test hypotheses. Through METI we can empirically test the hypothesis that transmitting an intentional signal will elicit a reply," he says.

The most compelling argument for METI's plans is that someone needs to make the first move. As Andrew Fraknoi, an astronomer from California's Foothill College, says; "If everyone who can send a message decides only to receive messages, it will be a very quiet galaxy."