One-sided love with Extra-Terrestrial
As human beings dominating planet earth, we have so much to be proud of. Be it taming of the wild animals, building several wonders of the world, and of course, landing on the moon. With our intellectual superiority, we have reached far and wide and are always longing for more.
It is not only in movies such as ‘The Extra-Terrestrial’ and ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ that humans have ventured out to know more about and communicate with aliens but in real life as well scientists have made innumerable attempts at doing this.
History stands as a testimony to the fact that efforts for interplanetary communication have been made using whatever means possible at different stages in time — be it lamps, radios, lasers, etc.
In 1869, the French inventor Charles Cros talked about the use of a parabolic mirror to focus the light from electric lamps towards Mars or Venus. He explained that the light could be flashed on and off in order to encode a message. Radio is generally assumed as a more suitable means of extraterrestrial communication. The logic behind this is that the radio waves are less affected by cosmic dust than visible light, and thus there is less of a radio background to deal with in the sky.
Until now, all these attempts of communicating have taken a similar approach to teach the numerals and basic arithmetic first. Refer to one such attempt of communicating using binary numbers made by a scientist.
Figure 1 consists of 1271 binary digits. Figure 2 shows a write out of the message in which binary 1’s have been replaced by dots and the 0’s have been left as blank spaces. In the top left corner, the sun can be spotted followed by eight planets right below it in a column. There are two beings in the pictogram with the male on the left pointing towards the fourth planet which is their apparent planet of residence. At the top of the pictogram, representations of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms are visible, which try to communicate the fact that the chemical composition on the alien’s planet is similar to the one at ours. Interesting, isn’t it?
Thus, the attempts highlighted above and many more of the like establish the fact that humans have had an unconventional approach towards reaching out to our unknown neighbors. With the communication techniques evolving with each passing day, it will be fascinating to see what happens next and who knows we might just be on a Zoom call with a Vulcan 50 years down the line!
