Scientists Are Ignoring This Grave Warning Stephen Hawking Made Before His Death
Naturally, there’s still no evidence that aliens are truly out there. None have popped over for harsh words about what exactly we’re doing to our planet just yet, so the jury is still out on this most fascinating of topics. One thing we do know, however, is that space is mind-bogglingly vast. The European Space Agency suggests that the Milky Way is home to around 100 thousand million stars, and when you consider the sheer millions of universes beyond, the scale of it all is simply incomprehensible.
Surely there’s something else, somewhere out there? Whether we’ll like the answer or not, it’s a question that scientists just can’t help asking. In 2023, Ars Technica reports that humanity will make its greatest effort yet to contact beings from other planets. The “A Beacon in the Galaxy” message, per Jonathan H. Jiang et al (via Cornell University), is described as “an updated, binary-coded message … for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy.” The intention of this message is to “establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth … as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface.”
Ars Technica goes on to explain that this information-laden message is intended to be sent via China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Should we be sending all this information out into the reaches of space? Stephen Hawking thought not.