On November 16 , 1974 , the unbelievable Arecibo radio telescope was used not to find radio brightness from the universe but to send out a substance to the stars . And 50 years on , the content , the content , and even the attempt at communicating with aliens remain as influential and jolly controversial as ever .

First of all , we involve to stress thatthis messagewas never a true try at communicate with an extraterrestrial civilisation . This interstellar content was more of a engineering demonstration sent to check off the remodeling of the telescope . First of all , we do not hump if aliens be , and second , its target in fact is nowhere near Earth .

The content has been institutionalize towards the Messier 13 , a globular cluster of up to half a million stars compact together across 145 unaccented - years . It is located over 22,000 faint - years from Earth and even assuming there ’s a planet with an intelligent civilisation there , it is not even certain that it will be in the right position to get the message when it arrives in 222 C .

The concept of theMETI , message extraterrestrial intelligence activity , is seen as the controversial cousin of SETI , the search for extraterrestrial intelligence . One idea is that transmit content out there might put a butt on our back , in theDark Foresthypothesis of exotic life … truth be order , we are alreadyleaking signalsinto infinite .

The message itself is just a series of binary pulses that - fundamentally a string of “ ones ” and “ zeroes”,transmitted over three proceedings . The content is simplistic but not precisely uncomplicated . The creation of the message involved many scientist , includingFrank Drakeand the recent Carl Sagan , and they were keen to communicate some crucial stuff about humanity .

The first part of the content is but the number 1 to 10 in binary . That should be quite square and be useful in the 2nd part of the subject matter . Five element out of the 118 currently love in the periodic tabular array were described . These were hydrogen , carbon , atomic number 7 , atomic number 8 , and phosphorus . They were prefer for their role in DNA .

In fact , the third portion of the message is the chemic normal of the molecules that makeDNA , succeed by a pictorial recreation of the double helix , the structure on which all our genetics are based .

The next morsel of the information is the estimate of the Earth ’s population at the time - 4.3 billion people as well as a control stick figure of a human with the number 14 . Once that is procreate by the wavelength of the message you get 1.76 m or 5 foot 9.4 in , the mean height of an grownup male person in the US . It was sure enough a selection to pick an modal excluding women or masses from beyond the U.S.

Then there ’s the mapping of the solar arrangement . A unsubdivided schematic drawing gives the then nine planet including Pluto . The position of the Earth is off from the rest of the system to make it decipherable where the message come from . And last but certainly not least , a formal view of the telescope .

The telescope that sent this message wasseverely damagedand was exclude down a few years ago ,   so the message has already survived its germ . While it weakens as it go around , eventually into intergalactic space , it might even survive humanity itself .