If the Creator wanted to leave some message for humans, where would the message board be?

Scientists want to know if the existence of our universe was deliberately created and have tried to prove it through some scientific studies. However, so far it is not conclusive whether a creator exists or not.

The universe is very mysterious. We don't know why it exists, and there are many unanswered questions about how it works. But what if it was created by an intelligent being for some purpose? How do we go about confirming this?

In 2005, two physicists suggested that if there is a Creator, they may have encoded information in the background radiation of the universe, which was left over from when the light was first released to flow freely through space. This light is known as the cosmic microwave background.

Recently, astrophysicist Michael Hippke of the Sonneberg Observatory in Germany, a participant in the Breakthrough Listening Project, was trying to find information about the Creator by converting the temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background radiation into a binary bit stream.

All the information he retrieved seemed to make no sense.

Hippke describes his method and findings in a paper that has been uploaded to a preprint server on the arXiv site (and is, therefore, subject to peer review); the paper includes the extracted bitstream information for those interested in studying it for themselves.

The cosmic microwave background is a very useful remnant of the early universe, dating back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Before that, the universe was completely dark, opaque, hot, and dense so that atoms could not form; protons and electrons were scattered around in the form of plasma.

As the universe cools and expands, these protons and electrons combine in a "recombination period" to form neutral hydrogen atoms. The universe gradually became clearer, and for the first time light could travel freely throughout space.

To this day, we can still detect the presence of the first light, although it is already very faint, it still pervades all known space. This is the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Because the early universe was inhomogeneous, the density variations of the "recombination period" are manifested today as very slight temperature fluctuations in the CMB.

Because the CMB is everywhere in the universe, theoretical physicists Stephen Hsu of the University of Oregon and Anthony Zee of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have come up with a purely theoretical idea that it could be a perfect billboard of information for civilization in any corner of the universe.

In their 2006 paper, they wrote: "Our findings do not in any way corroborate the trajectory of activity of higher intelligence; we simply want to ask, and try to answer, the question from a purely scientific standpoint: if such a message does exist, what is the medium of transmission and what is the content of the message left behind."

Their conjecture: this information could be encoded in binary form into the temperature variations of the CMB. That's what Hippke was trying to find - first having to answer Hsu and Zee's questions, and then using that data to find a valuable message.

"Hsu and Zee's hypothesis is that, first, the universe was created by some higher civilization and, second, that the Creator is trying to tell us that the universe we are in was created for some purpose." Hippke writes this.

"Hsu and Zee further speculate that the message of the CMB is identical to that of observers in all space and time, and we have reason to believe that it The amount of information contained is enormous (possibly thousands of bits)."

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Hippke found several problems with these claims. First, the CMB is still cooling. When it was first released, the CMB was about 3,000 K, and after 13.4 billion years, it's now only about 2.7 K. As the universe continues to age, it will eventually become undetectable. After about another 10^40 years, the CMB will disappear completely.

Leaving that aside for a moment, the physicists responded to Hsu and Zee's paper in 2006 by pointing out that observers at different locations in the universe cannot see the CMB in the same way. In addition, Hippke argued that because the foreground radiation comes from the Milky Way, we cannot observe the full CMB. therefore, the cosmological observations we make will have unavoidable uncertainties.

Based on these constraints, Hippke estimates that the information content will be much less than what Hsu and Zee assume - only about 1000 bits. This provides a good framework for him to extract the bitstream information.

Based on the temperature fluctuations of the CMB observed and recorded by the Planck satellite and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), Hippke extracted the bit streams from them and compared the results of each data set to find matching bits.

The first 500 bits of the bitstream information extracted by Hippke are shown in the figure below. The black part is the part where the two detectors have the same observed data, which has an accuracy of about 90%. The data marked in red is the part where the two deviate, and Hippke used data from the Planck satellite, which has an accuracy of about 60%.

Hippke found that changing the value field did not have much effect on the results. He searched the "Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences," but did not find any convincing results, even when approximating the data to a near-infinite future.

"I found no meaningful information in the real bitstream data." Hippke writes.

"We might conclude that we can't find any meaningful information about the 'Creator' through the CMB. But it is still unclear whether the 'Creator' exists; whether we live in a virtual world; or whether this information was presented only a second before and is just beyond our comprehension."

Whether these speculations are correct or not, some physicists still believe that there is a lot of information in the CMB that they want to convey to us.

"The CMB does contain a vast amount of information about the universe, and possibly about the physical properties of the highest energy layers." Douglas Scott and James Zibin, physicists at the University of British Columbia, write.

"The universe itself has left us with information."