Until recently, Americans were practically monopolists in the field aimed at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. For these purposes, the SETI program was launched, combining various projects and activities aimed at finding alien life forms using several thousand radio telescopes and radio transmitters around the world. And now, not wanting to stand aside, the UK is going to build its own network for search, research and communication with potential extraterrestrial living forms. The first meeting to discuss the construction of such a network took place on July 5 at the University of St Andrews of Scotland.
The UK network for the search for extraterrestrial life UKSRN (UK SETI Research Network) will bring together academics and scientists from 11 different institutes that will be engaged in a variety of scientific projects.
“We hope that our network will exceed the expectations of the UK astronomical community, which has repeatedly spoken in favor of building an analogue of the SETI project,” says UKSRN coordinator, Dr. Alan Penny.
More recently, under the patronage of the British SETI, a multi-element network e-MERLIN was made up, consisting of many radio telescopes located throughout England. It also includes the Lovell radio telescope, which from 1998 to 2003 searched for potential extraterrestrial radio signals and was part of the Project Phoenix project.
Collecting data from outer space is not as cheap and easy as it might seem at first glance. Firstly, special and rather expensive high-tech equipment is required, and secondly, the problem of determining the sources of these signals themselves often arises: perhaps they really are sent by an extraterrestrial mind, or perhaps your or a neighboring microwave, if you say very simply.
Modern radio telescopes, such as, for example, e-MERLIN, are able to more accurately analyze the information received. And the use of the Lovell telescope inside this network promises, in the opinion of scientists, to actually determine which of the received signals is unique and never previously detected.
But what to do next, if scientists still find and accept the signal of extraterrestrial life? Given the fact that far from all the ancient texts found even on our Earth are still not deciphered, how is humanity going to translate messages received from space? UKSRN should (or at least hope) solve this problem. Dr. John Elliot of the City of Leeds University believes that to develop a method for translating extraterrestrial messages, knowledge of our own human abilities will help us:
“Having looked under the external tinsel of seemingly arbitrary sounds and symbols, we can“ see ”the linguistic machine itself: its structure, conditions, as well as the evolutionary forces and compromises that shape it. If we learn to understand these structures, we will be able to collect from the data that information picture that was conceived by the author of this message. ”
The article is based on materials .
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