NASA to Lead Effort on Contacting Aliens in Defiance of Hawking's Warnings

The late iconic physics professor, Stephen Hawking, once warned that humanity has to be more careful about reaching out to extraterrestrial life, citing concerns that aliens might not necessarily be friendly.

Scientists from Earth are preparing a new message for aliens that will include a great deal of mathematical and biological data about humans, with the effort led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The message will include math equations and some DNA sequences, in contrast to the message that humanity first sent to space in 1974 from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. That one only included binary code and some images of the Solar System.

The new data appears to be much more elaborate, with one of the slides provided by Jiang even showing a picture of male and female humans, along with illustrations depicting the location of the Solar System.

A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects https://t.co/W1Lnez0vSS #Astrobiology #SETI #CarlSagan pic.twitter.com/oCBn1xzLB9

— Astrobiology (@astrobiology) March 24, 2022

The message contains 13 pages and is called "Beacon in the Galaxy". It will be sent to space even though many critics have already recalled warnings from the late professor Stephen Hawking, who was not a fan of actively contacting aliens.

"If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilisations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced", he said back in 2015.

However, NASA hopes that the aliens, should they exist and be willing to respond, will be friendly and try to establish an interstellar conversation. In order for that to theoretically happen, the researchers attached our return address so that aliens can locate our galaxy. What could possibly go wrong?