Forty-four years ago, on this day, a group of scientists gathered at Arecibo Observatory, located in the tropical forests of Puerto Rico. That was humankind’s first attempt at communication with intelligent life beyond our own planet. This day is being celebrated by Google.
The Arecibo message was an interstellar message. It was sent to a star cluster in space. It was anticipated that extraterrestrial intelligence may receive and decipher it.
The radio message was three minutes long. It was a series of exactly 1679 binary digits (a multiple of two prime numbers). It could be arranged in a grid of 73 rows and 23 columns. It was aimed at a cluster of stars named M 13. It lies 25,000 light years away from Earth.
The broadcast that was made was really powerful. That is because it used Arecibo’s megawatt transmitter attached to its 305 meter antenna. The antenna is capable of concentrating and transmitting energy by beaming it into a very small patch of sky.
The historic transmission had a dual-fold purpose. One was obviously as stated above, a means to make contact with alien life. The other purpose of this experiment was to demonstrate the capabilities of Arecibo’s recently upgraded radio telescope. It’s 1000- foot diameter dish made it the largest and most powerful telescope in the world at that time.
Google explained, “Since the Arecibo Message will take roughly 25,000 years to reach its intended destination (a group of 300,000 stars in the constellation Hercules was known as M13), humankind will have to wait a long time for an answer. How long? In the 44 years since it was first transmitted, the message has travelled only 259 trillion miles, only a tiny fraction of the 146,965,638,531,210,240 or so miles to its final destination.”
