Research & Curation

Introduction

The research behind BEACON is shaped by an interdisciplinary team bringing together diverse perspectives and knowledge systems. We’re excited to collaborate with experts across science, the humanities, and the cultural sector to build a peer-reviewed, collective narrative. Our approach to research and material selection is guided by two focus areas:

Earth Focus

Representing the social and ecological evolution of life on Earth, prioritizing the human experience.

Space Focus

Examining intelligibility across space and time through interplanetary channels, frameworks for extraterrestrial communication, and astrobiological insights.

With an emphasis on scholarly integrity and public access, our documented research will be published and made available through academic journals.

Our records will contain a diversified collection of visual and sonic materials, including thematically grouped images and sounds, dictionaries, encoding and decoding keys, and other features that support transmission and interpretation. Over the next five years, our primary focus will be the design and consolidation of these components—determining what content to include, how to organize it, and how to position its meanings for audiences both on Earth and beyond. Certain aspects of this research will also invite public participation through direct partnerships and selective open calls.

In the following section, we outline our 2023 paper to explain why our records center on visual and sonic modalities and to describe our current focus on content development. Research and proposals for the physical artifact will follow, shaped by the materials and technologies available at the time of its production.

Part 1:
Objectives and Key Contents of Interstellar Message

Message in a Bottle—An Update to the Golden Record:
1. Objectives and Key Content of the Message

Paper status: published

Jiang, J. H., Berea, A., Bowden, H., Das, P., Fahy, K. A., Ginsberg, J., et al.
Published on AGU Earth and Space Science, 04 December 2023

In the first installment of our research, we introduced the workflow of the anticipated BEA-CON mission, outlining two modalities for encoded content, as well as the types of content suitable for an interstellar message—materials that could most likely bridge interpretability in Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) communications and maintain intelligibility over time.

Visual & Sonic Modalities

Our proposal of visual and sonic content modalities draws upon existing hypotheses on interstellar communication, informed by NASA research in 2014, which outlines communication methods based on physical universals.

Given the independent evolution of both vision and hearing across a multitude of Earthly species, the scientific assumption is that extraterrestrial species may also possess inherent abilities to sense and process stimuli from electromagnetic (EM) waves and/or oscillations in pressure, corresponding with the ability to see and hear, albeit at different wavelengths and frequencies.

“The convergent traits of seeing and hearing may serve as proxies for probable universal features of communication that traverse the limits of our own biological frame of reference.” — Jiang, et al., 2023

Content Tiers

The interstellar message is designed with two tiers of content, accommodating extraterrestrials with different levels of sophistication:

TIER 1

Comprises simple illustrations of fundamental concepts about humanity and our environment. The content here would be accessible without advanced technology.

TIER 2

Includes digitized information (images and sounds) with more complexity about life on Earth, intended to be perceived by an advanced civilization.

Flowchart titled Interstellar Message, split into a less-advanced tier, an advanced tier, and location and time stamps, with branches for cover design, images, binary codes, and sounds.

FIG. 1. Schematic tree diagram depicting the key components of the message. The diagram provides a visual representation of the essential elements comprising the message intended for potential extraterrestrial recipients. Organized into three different sections, the message is intended for varying extraterrestrial civilizations. These sections encompass scientific documentation, including Earth's spatial coordinates and a potential timestamp.

Dictionaries

To make the message interpretable beyond Earth, the content includes “dictionaries” rooted in mathematics and physics. These establish a baseline language for understanding, anchoring the message in constants like numbers, elements, and astronomical reference points much like the Voyager Golden Records.

Location & Time Stamps

Time and location markers further orient recipients to when and where the record originated, as well as provide a logical representation indicative of our place in the cosmos.

Location Map

Consisting of a GPS via application of globular clusters (GCs) and millisecond pulsars.

Time Stamp

Specifying the design and launch time of the proposed location map, allowing future decoding to realize the timeline of human existence.

Diagram of lines from the galactic center to labeled globular clusters and millisecond pulsars, including 47 Tucanae and Omega Centauri.

FIG. 2. The proposed GC-based location map for the interstellar message. This schematic representation depicts a celestial location map that relies on the longitudinal distribution of globular clusters (GCs) as reference points with reference to the galactic center, with each GC indicated by its respective millisecond pulsar (MSP) marker(s). GCs, known for their stability, serve as crucial cosmic landmarks for interstellar navigation and communication, with MSPs enhancing precision in celestial positioning.

Part 2: Selection of Images (Working Paper)

Paper status: Research in progress

Anticipated year of publication: 2026

Overview

We are currently in this second research phase, which focuses on the process of image selection. The goal is to create a visual compendium offering a cohesive, pictorial representation of our world. This phase forms one of the core narrative components of the interstellar message and time capsule, highlighting the diversity underpinning humanity’s existence.

Guiding principles

Our guiding principles for image selection are grounded in our values of plurality, integrity, curiosity, expressivity, and optimism. We seek to honor a narrative of biodiversity, while highlighting Earth’s story of interdependence. Selected images will communicate this sense of collective existence and broad cultural expression, conveying the candid realities that inform the essence of our humanity and planet.

Process

The Image Selection Team is made up of co-authors—academics, scientists, historians, practitioners across fields—and curators—esteemed photo editors, curatorial professionals and cultural stewards. The two groups will work closely together to identify the best examples for their thematic category. This collaboration ensures our selections are not only scientifically-based, but also culturally relevant, nuanced, visually compelling, and most importantly, likely to remain intelligible across millennia.

Images may include photography, illustrations, scientific imaging, and digital ephemera. The selection methodology and example images will be detailed in a formal, peer-reviewed academic paper authored by the Image Selection Team, to be published in 2026. Once published, the proposed selection methodology will serve as practical guidelines for the subsequent sourcing phase, where we can invite input from the global public.

The selection framework and content proposal for the other core narrative component of “sounds,” consisting of sonic media, will come after our research on images. Similarly, after finalizing both the visual and sonic components, we will direct our focus to the design of “dictionaries” and message descriptions. This research phase will be dedicated to the positioning of the interstellar message in extraterrestrial communication.