Scott Ransom & Nadia Drake

National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, April 18, 12:00 pm

Finding Earth: A Roadmap for Aliens

In the early 1970s, four spacecraft left Earth inscribed with messages for intelligent alien civilizations that they might encounter over billions of years drifting through the Galaxy. An important part of those messages was the iconic “pulsar map” that shows the location of the solar system both in space and in time. Unfortunately, the map will “only” be accurate for some tens of millions of years. We have developed a much better map, using millisecond pulsars, which will be accurate for hundreds of millions of years. Perhaps future interstellar spacecraft could carry a map like this new one, along with other messages from humankind.