14 DAY TRIAL // Over the years, numerous initiatives that sought to find alien civilizations have appeared around the world. These groups benefit from powerful telescopes and transmitters and constantly broadcast messages that contain our location into deep-space. But for a while, some voices have been arguing that the codes sent into the vastness are too complex for alien civilizations to decipher and that they should be made simpler. This is exactly what a team of researchers did. They argue that any potential alien with a bit of mathematical training and knowledge of astronomy can crack it, Wired reports.
The new code was designed by geoscientist Michael Busch, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and colleague Rachel Reddick, a physicist based at the Stanford University. The duo published the new study in the Friday online issue of the scientific journal arXiv. In the entry, the two wrote that very little attention has been paid in the past to “ensuring that a transmitted message will be understandable to an alien listener.” They argue that neither the 1974 Arecibo message, nor the 1993/2003 Cosmic Calls were properly tested for sense before they were beamed away.
This is one of the main reasons why the team decided to take the task of developing a brand new code all by itself. The algorithms themselves were developed by Busch, with Reddick acting as the alien receiver. The main difference between the new code and all those that came before it is the fact that the new one is supposed to come out as an equation at the other end. All the others were designed in such a manner that they could only be constructed as images, the researchers say. Busch and Reddick add that the aliens need only have at least an equivalent knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and physics,” in order to understand the message.
Upon receiving the code, Reddick (who was acting as an alien receiver at the time), used nothing more than a pen, pencil, and a computer search-and-replace function to decipher the message. It began with the description of gravity and of atomic mass ratios, which the two believe are “dimensionless numbers that should be universally recognized”. Regardless of where they live (if they do), extraterrestrials are subjected to gravity in the same way we are, the team hypothesized. The message also contained details of our solar system, in addition to descriptions of atoms and chemical formulas.