Science Technology About Space Research Assignment (Research Paper Sample)

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Science Technology about Space
The interest for the space world began long time ago with the first significant breakthrough being the launching of a satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 when they launched Sputnik. This man’s desire to understand the space and the pursuit of discovering existence of life in the outer space has not ended, with recent developments focusing on sending deliberate messages to the outer space in the hope of reaching alien civilization. Human beings have been sending these messages to aliens through codes and images detailing human civilization which has prompted a heated debate on whether these actions expose the human race to danger from aliens who human beings know little about while if they have been receiving the messages from earth know a lot about the human race.
The first significant and powerful attempt to ‘contact’ the aliens was in 1974 from an Arecibo radio telescope developed by Frank Drake in Puerto Rico. The destination of the message was globular cluster M13. Stream of bits totaling 1679 bits was transmitted at two radio frequencies near 2380 MHz with each radio frequency having a bandwidth of 10 Hz. The message was stored in a standard system of encoding that would occupy 800 bits of computer memory. The message transmitted had 73 rows and 23 columns detailing the numbering system, the DNA structure, chemical atomic numbers, a figure of a human being, population of Earth, diagram of solar system, and an image of the Arecibo telescope. The message was developed through the help of Carl Sagan (Gilmour & Sephton 2004, p.294).
Another attempt to send messages to the aliens was done in 1999 using RT-70 Radio Astronomical Telescope in Ukraine. This experiment was under the leadership of Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas and was the first multi-page Ion Release Module (IRM). It had four sets of messages with a total duration of 960 minutes and transmitting 8640 MJ of energy (Shuch 2011, p.402). These scientists used universal mathematical and scientific concepts that would be easily understood by the aliens.
The Teen Age Message was transmitted in 2001 involving Russian scientists and teenagers. The message was transmitted from Yevpatoria Deep Space center and was intended for six Sun-like stars. It had three sections with the first section representing coherent-sounding radio signal, the second section contained analog information representing musical melodies, and the last section represented Arecibo-like binary digital information (Pillai 2015, p.68).
Cosmic Call 2 was transmitted on 6 July 2003 to HD 10308 using the 70 m Eupatoria Planetary Radar and the message is expected to arrive in September 2044 with the reply reaching planet earth in Christmas of 2085 (Bagnall 2012, p.26). The message consisted of photos and other multimedia files.
According to Billingham and Pesek (Eds.) (2013, p.20), scientists expect messages from alien civilization to be decodable albeit in a slow and halting manner. No individual scientist knows for sure the consequences of messages coming from alien civilization. However scientists and proponents of extraterrestrial communication argue that if at all the message from aliens will be offensive, the receivers have the liberty of not acknowledging the message and thus preventing the sender from confirming whether the message reached its intended target. Therefore, transmission of radio messages poses very little danger if any to human kind instead holds tremendous benefit to human kind in terms of discoveries that have technological benefit to humanity.
Salla (2006, p.297) states that there has been evidence from testimonies of different contactees and whistleblowers of existence of extraterrestrial visitors living indistinguishably with human beings. These visitors have similar physical characteristics with those of the average human beings and have blended seamlessly in the community. If this assertion is to be believed, then the human race has not reason to be afraid of aliens since so far they have proved that they have no intention of harming human beings. The only worries then should be, establishing the length of time they have been on planet earth, ultimate mission, their numbers, their reproduction mechanisms, and the risk of having them on earth in high population.
According to Taube and Leenders (1998, p.367), the best way to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligent beings is through mathemat...