On November 16, 1974, the incredible Arecibo radio telescope was used not to receive radio light from the universe but to send out a message to the stars. And 50 years on, the message, the content, and even the attempt at communicating with aliens remain as influential and somewhat controversial as ever.
First of all, we need to stress that this message was never a true attempt at communicating with an extraterrestrial civilization. This interstellar message was more of a technology demonstration sent to mark the remodeling of the telescope. First of all, we do not know if aliens exist, and secondly, its target in fact is nowhere near Earth.
The message has been sent towards the Messier 13, a globular cluster of up to half a million stars packed together across 145 light-years. It is located over 22,000 light-years from Earth and even assuming there’s a planet with an intelligent civilization there, it is not even certain that it will be in the right position to get the message when it arrives in 222 centuries.
The concept of the METI, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, is seen as the controversial cousin of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. One idea is that sending messages out there might put a target on our back, in the Dark Forest hypothesis of alien life… truth be told, we are already leaking signals into space.
The message itself is just a series of binary pulses that – basically a string of “ones” and “zeroes”, transmitted over three minutes. The content is simplistic but not exactly simple. The creation of the message involved many scientists, including Frank Drake and the late Carl Sagan, and they were keen to communicate some crucial stuff about humanity.
The first part of the message is simply the numbers 1 to 10 in binary. That should be quite straightforward and be useful in the second part of the message. Five elements out of the 118 currently known in the periodic table were described. These were hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus. They were chosen for their role in DNA.
In fact, the third portion of the message is the chemical formulae of the molecules that make DNA, followed by a graphic recreation of the double helix, the structure on which all our genetics are based.
The next bit of the information is the estimate of the Earth’s population at the time – 4.3 billion people as well as a stick figure of a human with the number 14. Once that is multiplied by the wavelength of the message you get 1.76m or 5 ft 9.4 inches, the average height of an adult male in the US. It was certainly a choice to pick an average excluding women or people from beyond the U.S.
Then there’s the map of the solar system. A simple schematic gives the then nine planets including Pluto. The position of the Earth is off from the rest of the system to make it clear where the message comes from. And last but certainly not least, a schematic view of the telescope.
The telescope that sent this message was severely damaged and was shut down a few years ago, so the message has already survived its source. While it weakens as it spreads, eventually into intergalactic space, it might even survive humanity itself.
Source Link: 50 Years Ago We Sent A Message Toward Stars Beyond Our Galaxy- This Is What It Said
