Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

If one day we really receive a signal from an alien civilization, should we reply?

This is a very controversial topic, especially under the influence of Liu's "Dark Forest" hypothesis. I believe many people tend to "Don't answer! don't answer! don't answer!" .

But for scientists obsessed with the unknown, this nihilistic fear cannot hide their strong curiosity. Including Hawking, who had been warning us not to "talk to aliens", not only made a U-turn, but even took an active part in the search for extraterrestrial civilizations, participating in and carrying out a project known as the "Breakthrough Project."

The Breakthrough Initiative, also known as the Breakthrough Initiative, which Hawking participated in, is a project founded by Israeli entrepreneur Yuri Milner. Yuri, a financier and former physicist, founded the project to find basic questions about life in the universe: are we alone, for example? Are there any habitable planets near our galaxy? Can we go to those planets?

In order to answer these questions, Yuri Milner divided the entire breakthrough program into four sub-projects: breakthrough listening (Breakthrough Listen), Breakthrough message (Breakthrough Message), Breakthrough observation (Breakthrough Watch) and Breakthrough Star Photography (Breakthrough Starshot).

Breakthrough listening is a program designed to passively receive signals from alien civilizations. That is to say, whether to reply or not to put aside, we first try to collect those signals from the universe, and then find ways to screen out those that may be alien civilizations.

Speaking of which, I would like to mention the famous "Wow! signal" in the 1970s. The signal was picked up in 1977 by a radio telescope called Big ear. At that time, the computer used paper tape, which recorded the strength of the received signal by increasing from 1 to 9 and then from A to Z.

Normally the signals are the background noise of 1 and 2, but one day Jerry Eman, a volunteer, noticed a sudden column of English letters on the paper tape. it means that the strength of the signal we receive has surged over a period of 72 seconds. So Eman could not help exclaiming "Wow!" and wrote it down casually.

So is this signal sent by an alien civilization or not? Since then until the 21st century, scientists have made countless attempts through various radio telescopes, but have never received similar high-intensity signals again. So up to now, although we are not sure that it is from an alien civilization, we cannot rule out this possibility.

Turning to the Breakthrough listening Program, the program will cooperate with a number of ground-based telescopes, including China's "FAST", as well as some space telescopes, including "TESS", to search for a large number of targets in the universe through radio, optics and other means with the help of more advanced equipment. It covers not only 1 million stars near the solar system and the entire disk of the Milky way, but even hundreds of extragalactic galaxies near the Milky way.

The SkyEye FAST radio telescope is an important part of the breakthrough program, which was co-launched by Yuri and Hawking in 2015 and is expected to cost $100 million. This makes people think of Evans and Ye Wenjie in the "three-body", one with capital and the other with technology, which can be described as "hit it off".

Since the implementation of the plan, the relevant teams have conducted detailed investigations on a number of key objectives. Among them are Proxima b, the nearest exoplanet; Omomo, an interstellar visitor suddenly intruding from outside the solar system; and some special fast radio storms. For these goals, have been introduced before, I believe that the old audience are no stranger.

Interstellar visitor "O'Momo" (imaginary picture) if one day we do receive a clear and accurate alien civilization signal, should we reply and how should we reply? This is another sub-project of the Breakthrough Program, the Breakthrough message Project.

In addition to passively receiving external signals, we also need to consider how to actively reply and send signals to alien civilizations, and even how to establish communication with them.

Breakthrough information is not so much a research as a competition. It is expected to cost $1 million and aims to design a message that can be understood by another civilization and that contains key elements such as Earth, life and human beings.

Here we have to mention the same "Arecibo message" from the 1970s. Through a set of only 1679 0101 binary numbers, this information represents and covers decimal, DNA elements, human form, solar system celestial bodies, and the shape of the Arecibo radio telescope.

Arecibo information this group of information was sent to globular cluster M13 in 1974. If there is a sufficiently advanced civilization there, I believe they will receive our message after 25000 years.

Apart from solving the information problem itself, the Breakthrough message Plan has also triggered a discussion on the question of "whether human beings should send signals to the outside world".

In addition to receiving and sending signals, we have been able to use existing technology to roughly analyze the situation of some exoplanets, which is also the third sub-project of the breakthrough program, the Breakthrough Watch program.

The Breakthrough Watch program aims to investigate rocky planets within 20 light-years of Earth, such as analyzing the composition of their atmosphere to determine whether they are suitable for life, which is one of the main tasks of the Weber Telescope.

Weber telescope analysis of atmospheric water molecules on exoplanet WASP-96b if it is found that an exoplanet is very habitable, how do we get there in light years? Or we have established contact with an alien civilization, the next step is certainly not satisfied with just being "netizens", but to consider how to "face the base". This leads to the last item of the breakthrough plan, the "Breakthrough Star" project.

Breakthrough star photography is an active technical research on interstellar navigation. To avoid taking too big a step, the researchers set themselves a "small goal": to launch a miniature probe into the trisomy's hometown, our nearest neighbor. All right, the "trisomy" is us.

Although the distance of Proxima is 4.2 light-years away, there is little hope for current refrigerant-powered spacecraft in the foreseeable future. However, if we can fully master the technology such as light sail, I believe that the realization of "small goals" is not a long way off.

Hawking and the Breakthrough Star Program based on Lightsail receive information, send information, actively search, and interstellar voyage. the whole breakthrough plan is very comprehensive, and it is also the most important part of the current "search for Extraterrestrial Civilization Program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI)", which is the most important part of the SETI project that we are familiar with.

Search for extraterrestrial civilizations (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI) official website "the earth is the cradle of mankind, but people can not live in the cradle forever". Whether it is Gagarin's first entry into space in 1961 or the first radio broadcast beyond Earth in 1962, as an intelligent civilization, we are destined to one day step out of the cradle and go to a broader interstellar space.

The first astronaut to go into space, Gagarin, this article is from the official Wechat account: Linvo says ID:linvo001, by Linvo

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