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Fifty years ago on Saturday, astronomers sent the first message into deep space composed by humankind for alien consumption.
The Arecibo Message, sent from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, was directed at a star cluster called Messier 13 about 25,000 light years from Earth.
It consisted of 1,679 bits of data arranged in 73 rows, conveying in binary format the numbers one to ten, the atomic numbers of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and phosphorus, a stick figure of a human, and simplified representations of DNA and the solar system.
The film Contact notes that radio signals have been heading out from Earth at the speed of light since at least the primitive TV broadcast of the 1936 Olympics, but the Arecibo message was humanity’s first deliberate attempt to introduce itself to the cosmos.
It’s still only a five-hundredth of the way to Messier 13. There has, as yet, been no reply.
