The Arecibo Message And METI | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org [Music] let's say you're at a party and you're hanging out with a buddy who happens to be an off-duty cop and then a crazed serial killer runs in and just starts like slicing up everybody at the party so you run for your life you run upstairs you find an empty bedroom you hide in the closet and then after a minute you hear somebody walk into the room and you can't see who it is because it's dark and it might be your buddy who could save you or it might be the serial killer that would murder you but the only way that you'll know is if you call out to them so do you call out or do you stay silent that's kind of the situation we're in as a species that's hyperbolic of course but we are just kind of sitting here on this tiny watery blue ball in the middle of this vast void and we think there's probably somebody else out there and then we don't know if there is somebody out there would they be friendly or would they with all that uncertainty is it better to call out or keep quiet we're all familiar with SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and their mission of scanning the skies looking for signals that might be indicative of intelligent life in the universe you could call them the Big Ear of the scientific community not to be confused with the Big Ear telescope which found the WoW signal which I covered in a previous video but there's another group of people that want to be the mouth or the scientific community that think that while we should be listening for signals we should also be speaking and sending signals out there for possible alien civilizations to find us this is called Medi or messaging extraterrestrial intelligence sometimes called active SETI and it's a very controversial subject there's a lot of debate around it it's fairly new but long before this debate got started there was the Arecibo message the Arecibo radio Observatory is a giant 1,000 foot telescope built into a sinkhole in the middle of the rainforest in Puerto Rico which was the biggest telescope in the world when it was built in 1963 which was only surpassed in 2016 with a 500 meter telescope in China with its seven hundred ninety thousand square feet of collecting area it's one of the most sensitive telescopes in the world the 1974 is shut down briefly for some upgrades for the reopening they wanted to do something big something that would get a lot of attention and excite people's interest in what they do there it is publicly financed after all and they decided that maybe instead of collecting some radio signals they could since I'm out for this they pulled in the dream team of Carl Sagan and Frank Drake who had just worked together a couple of years previous to create the Pioneer plaques for the Pioneer 10 and 11 pros the Pioneer plaque and later the Voyager Golden Record were both visual things that some alien eventually could possibly hold and see but how do you get visual information across with a radio wave I mean yeah we transmit information over radio signals all the time that's kind of the whole point but we're using a common language we're using equipment that's standardized that we know how to interpret that we know how to decode the signal once it comes in how do you get information across to somebody who doesn't speak a common language doesn't have the same equipment there and doesn't know what they're looking at so to explain how they did this I thought it might be fun to kind of put yourself in the position of the little green man that finds it signal and the process that you would have to go through to decode it all right so you're a little alien dude and you're sitting there at a radio telescope on your home planet and suddenly you find this very strong signal from a very specific point in space this is a really weird signal because it's at 23 80 megahertz but it down shifts down 10 Hertz at very random intervals but also very regular intervals this is clearly not natural so after examining the signal you come to realize that these down shifts are occurring every 10 times per second or whatever unit of time you may use on your planet you can tell that it's happening in very regular intervals this is clearly not something's coming from a star so on a whim you add up all those different intervals and it comes out to 1679 this is where things get interesting because 1679 is a semi prime number meaning it's only divisible by itself and one and then two other prime numbers in this case the numbers 23 and 73 if you're really clever alien you might have already figured out that these down shifts were sort of a binary code ones and zeros and you might have wondered what that 23 and 73 men maybe what would happen if you put that on a grid 23 by 73 what would that look like you might try 23 columns in 73 rows and get something like this which doesn't really look like anything so maybe you try it the other way 23 rows and 73 columns and you get this this is where all the little green nerds standing around the computer screen I'll go whoa this is clearly an organized image made from a clearly intelligent lifeform man Carl Sagan's and with further examination and cleverness the details of the image would begin to reveal themselves at the top of the images are the numbers 1 through 10 and binary language now whether or not the alien species would understand these numbers or the binary code that's up for debate but the idea is that this would serve as a primer to understanding the rest of the message rosetta stone if you will so using the binary code below the numbers we have a pictogram that combines the numbers 1 6 7 8 and 15 these are the atomic numbers for hydrogen carbon nitrogen oxygen and phosphorus these are the five elements that make up DNA they spell out DNA even further below that using the same method to simulate alternating molecules of deoxyribose and phosphate on the sides which make up the backbone of the DNA as well as the inner base pairs of adenine thymine cytosine and guanine below that they just straight-up draw a DNA double helix with the middle bar coded to represent the number of nucleotides which at the time they thought was 4.3 billion base pairs but it's currently thought to be more like 3.2 billion so these aliens won't be passing any Athey bio classes with this message unfortunately then we get to a little figure of a man or woman a human with the element on the Left coded to show height and the one on the right displays the size of the population at the time then we get a pixelated look at the solar system with the Sun on the left and the planets aligned by size with the earth slightly raised indicate that's where we came from and yes Pluto was considered a full planet back then so it's on there and finally an image of the Arecibo telescope itself which if he asked me was just a promotional thing because this was all about celebrating the reopening of the telescope so the next big question may be who would actually receive this message where did they send it to and the dumb answer is they sent it out since the Arecibo telescope is stationary it basically is pointing at whatever the earth is pointing it toward so if you want to point it at a specific point in the sky you have to wait until the Earth turns to that side and since the sending of the signal was part of a reopening event it basically was just sending it out to whatever it was pointing to at that particular moment in time in this case it was the m13 star cluster actually they do have a limited ability to aim it and the best option at that particular time was in it wasn't considered then and is not considered now a particularly good contender for life and even if it was it's gonna take 25,000 years for the signal to get there and then another 25 thousand years for that signal to get back so we're looking at 50,000 years even if this was successful and another thing to complicate that is that the m13 cluster may have actually moved by the time the signal reaches to it so it really was more of a symbolic gesture more of a message in a bottle if you will but the Arecibo message is far from being the only message we sent out into space in fact it wasn't even the first the Morse message was a signal sent in 1962 and simple Morse code by the Russians toward the planet Venus while it obviously didn't contact anybody shion's it's believed that it actually bounced off the planet and is now headed toward the star HD 1313 36 in the Libra constellation but since Arecibo especially starting in the 1990s there's been a flurry of ir M's or interstellar radio messages they've gone out there's the across the universe message that being the Beatles song of the same name toward Polaris the North Star there's the hello from Earth and message from earth messages that were both sent towards the exoplanet Gliese 581c and these consisted of text messages and tweets from people all around the world there's the cosmic call project that sent out signals to two different sun-like stars and there's the WoW reply signal that was actually meant to be a reply to the well signal that was actually sent from the Arecibo telescope in 2012 and then there was a Doritos ad that was sent out in 2008 some of these were genuine attempts to contact alien species some of them were just symbolic gestures some of them were promotional stunts but it's really started a debate as to whether or not this is really a good idea there's a strong coalition of scientific thinkers like Stephen Hawking Michio Kaku and even Elon Musk who think that's a much better idea for us to just kind of be quiet and listen for a while so that we know what it is we're sending signals out to I've talked on this channel before about the Fermi paradox and the idea of great filters the concept that because the sheer number of stars out there in the universe we should be swimming in signals from intelligent species and yet we haven't found any the conclusion is that intelligent species have some kind of an expiration date a great filter something that seems to end their run pretty soon after they reach the ability to send radio signals out in one possible reason for this it's definitely a sci-fi trope is the idea of aggressive civilizations out there that seek out emerging civilizations and wipe them out a super predator if you will and this could explain the silence in a couple of ways one is the extinction of these possible civilizations and the other is just that they're all being quiet because they're trying to avoid an aggressive civilization there may be hundreds of intelligent species out there but much like the many detractors they decide that it will be better to just be silent and so we don't see any evidence of them but another great filter is internal the idea that any advanced species reaches an environmental breaking point where their planet becomes unsustainable kind of like the resource depletion and climate change that we're seeing here right now and if this is the case and it's a frightening tipping point that we seem to be barreling toward and if there were species out there that have actually overcome this and gotten past it it would probably be in our best interest to reach out to them and learn from them in one much more benign answers that there's still plenty of intelligent species out there they've just moved beyond radio signals as a form of communication in fact the window at which a species uses radio to communicate might just be really small we've only been using radio signals at a strength that can actually leave our solar system for the last 80 years or so and already our use of it has gone down quite a bit radio and TV signal noise actually peaked in the 1980s this was when the most people were watching TV over broadcast airwaves and since then Cable has taken over Internet satellite communications they've all kind of taken the place of broadcast signals and it's been going down ever since then so maybe it's not that these species met some horrible end maybe they just got cable and maybe that window of radio communication in the timescale of the universe is just a tiny little blip that we just happen to be in right now in fact due to the vast distances we're talking about here by the time an alien civilization received our signal and then responded to it we may progress to the point that we wouldn't be able to decipher their radio signals anymore so the whole exercise might just be pointless so it all comes back to the original question is it safer to reach out or is it safer to stay quiet do we risk getting the attention of some hyper-violent alien predator species or are we more in danger from ourselves this is a topic of serious debate and I invite you to do so down in the comments do you think it's a good idea to reach out yes or no give me a reasons why maybe I'll follow up on that in the future video and if you'd really like to get into the nuts and 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 279,457

Rating: 4.9085984 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, the aricebo message, arecibo radio telescope, METI, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, exoplanets, carl sagan, frank drake, radio signals, interstellar radio message, pioneer plaque, voyager golden record, intelligent life, drake equation

Id: g76WDQY_ysk

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018