On this twenty-four hours 44 years ago , humankind made their first concerted exertion to make middleman with foreigner in the universe . And while it ’ll be thousands of years before the message arrives anywhere of note , the issue did help us consider our place in the cosmea .
This was the Arecibo Message , direct on November 16 , 1974 , from the Arecibo radiocommunication telescope in Puerto Rico . The message was a series of radio waves , containing the equivalent of 210 byte of data , send towards a nearby group of genius called M13 . It was honored today in aGoogle Doodle .
Located 22,000 light - years away , it ’ll take that same amount of time for our substance to in reality contact this globular star clustering . Whether anyone could really decipher the message , or whether there is anyone there to have it , is another payoff entirely .
The message was worked on by a phone number of scientist , includingFrank Drakeand the late Carl Sagan . It was basically a string of “ ace ” and “ zeroes”,transmitted over three minutes . In theory , an exotic race receive the message would be capable to decode it .
If they did , they would detect some information about humanity and our knowledge of the universe . The message contains the numbers 1 to 10 , the nuclear numbers of elements include atomic number 1 and carbon , and the formulae for the construction blocks of DNA .
It also contains a representation of a double spiral of DNA , a stick name of a human being , the number of people on Earth ( 4 billion at the time ) , a mapping of our Solar System , and a lottery of the Arecibo wireless telescope .
However , if you ’re hop for anyone to receive the subject matter or for a answer , you might be out of chance . By the sentence the substance arrives at the location of M13 it was sent towards , the clump of stars will have moved on . The message will get in to no one .
The real use of the content was to show the power of the Arecibo radio scope . " It was rigorously a symbolical event , to show that we could do it , " Donald Campbell from Cornell University , who forge on the Arecibo Observatory at the time , aver back on the25th anniversaryof the event in 1999 .
Still , it ’s nice to know there ’s a little fleck of humanity give its way through the galaxy . The Arecibo Message has spawnedmany imitations , and continues to be a source of hope that there might be others out there . Who knows , peradventure someone else has sent their own Arecibo Message our way too .
