Aliens by Joalda Morancy
Neon Squid is a new imprint of Macmillan Children’s Books, born in the midst of the pandemic, which ‘creates beautiful non-fiction for inquisitive kids (and kids at heart), and believes that ‘the most amazing stories are the real ones’. In today’s blog, author and scientist Joalda Morancy explores a topic that has captured the imagination of many people – the search for alien life in the universe and possible ways of communicating with them.
In my new book Aliens, readers learn that the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe is quite a unique pursuit. Across the world, scientists are figuring out how exactly we might find alien life. What type of characteristics or chemical elements, known as biosignatures, indicate the possibility of life? What kind of environments can host these organisms – maybe the hottest planet in our solar system or the deep underground oceans of various moons?
Could there be intelligent alien life elsewhere in the galaxy and beyond? It’s an exciting prospect that creates an equal amount of scientific and philosophical questions. Let’s look deeper and explore how humanity has tried communicating with aliens in the past and what our first contact with extraterrestrials may look like!
The Pioneer Missions & Voyager Golden Record
The Pioneer missions of the 1970s were among the first to leave our solar system. On board were special plaques – some of the first pieces of a spacecraft meant for communicating with alien life. Included was a Golden Record, containing plentiful information about humanity as we know it, including sounds of animals, images, and music.
The Arecibo Message
The Arecibo message was a more direct attempt at communicating with an intelligent species. It utilised what was, at the time, one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The message was to be sent to a cluster of stars over 22,000 light-years away, meaning it would take the signal that much time to reach the cluster while traveling at the speed of light! The message itself includes data on our numbering system, chemical elements, the human body and DNA, our home solar system, and, last but not least, the Arecibo radio telescope itself.
First Contact
One of the most popular questions in the search for extraterrestrials is what first contact will look like. If we were to find microbes, it could change the way we see the world around us. If we run into a more intelligent species, it may be worth making sure they know we come in peace! We often see abductions or destructive wars in films and TV shows. In reality, an alien species could just be confused as we are and may be curious to learn more about how the Earth operates. One of the first things that must occur if we choose to interact with a fellow intelligent species is a deep dive into communications. How do we converse and interact with something we are entirely unfamiliar with? It’s an issue that goes beyond science and into fields such as linguistics.
These three topics, plus many others, are featured in Aliens. The book provides a grand scale of life as we know it, and I hope it can help inspire the next generation of alien hunters, possibly the first to find alien life in our universe! Joalda Morancy is an astrophysicist, aerospace engineer, and science communicator. Their passion for space exploration started with watching a YouTube video about the International Space Station in school. Joalda has worked on satellites imaging Earth from space at NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory and helped build life support systems for Blue Origin’s upcoming space station, Orbital Reef. Currently at Blue Origin they’re working on lunar lander avionics. In the future, Joalda hopes to continue supporting humanity’s journey to the stars. Aliens is their first book and is published by Neon Squid.
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