On November 16, 1974, a team of daring explorers sent a coded message into the atmosphere in hopes of connecting with aliens across the galaxy. Using an advanced Arecibo radio telescope, a team from Puerto Rico sent a signal known as the Arecibo message, which contained vital information about human life in space.
The transmission was plotted on a graph and information was sent about the solar system, DNA, a summary of a human being, Earth’s population, and essential biochemical elements crucial to life.
The carefully crafted stream consisted of 1,679 bits that were arranged on 73 lines of 23 characters.
Written in binary code, a series of ones and zeros were transmitted by frequency offset at a rate of 10 bits per second.
The transmission sent to communicate with life outside of Earth lasted less than three minutes.
It was aimed at the M13 globular star cluster, which is located about 25,000 light years from Earth.
The cluster located near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy and contains approximately 300,000 stars.
However, it was never expected to reach its destination, as the stars will have moved when the message arrives.
Dr. Frank Drake of Cornell University wrote the message along with a team of scans, which also included the entire atomic number of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus that form deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
Now that more than 46 years have passed, part of the information sent will now be out of date, in 1974 the transmission said that the size of the human population was almost 4,300 million, this has now almost doubled to 7,700 million.
In 1999, Cornell University insisted that the true purpose of the message was not to make contact but to show the power of the new advanced equipment.
In 2010 Professor Stephen Hawking issued a severe warning against contact with any life outside of planet Earth.
Professor Hawking compared the mission to Christopher Columbus discovering the United States in the 15th century.
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Meanwhile, Dan Werthimer, a SETI researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, said: “It’s like yelling in a forest before you know if there are tigers, lions and bears, or other dangerous animals there.”
The only signs of a message from outside the universe were detected in 2001, when a crop circle was found in a field in the UK.
In Hampshire, a crop circle initially seemed to reflect the original message with some subtle changes, it had exchanged the carbon element of the initial DNA for silicon and the depicted human being was replaced by a typical alien found in science fiction novels: it was Quickly considered a hoax.
