The Arecibo Message

In 1974 a message was beamed into space from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, one of the very few such messages that have ever been sent. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Doug Vakoch is president of METI International, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Vakoch: It was a message written in the language of math and science, simply a bunch of ones and zeros, pulses of slightly different frequencies, for about three minutes. And so it was a very brief message, but if the extraterrestrials reconstruct it correctly, they’ll see that it’s a two-dimensional diagram that gives an introduction to the chemistry that’s important to life on earth, something about ourselves, our solar system.

Just like early television was transmitted by rows of black and white dots, this message conveyed a visual image represented by rows of ones and zeroes.

Vakoch: At the top of the Arecibo message are the numbers from one to ten, written in binary, the simplest numbering system. Then underneath that, there’s a description of five chemical elements that are essential to life on earth. Then there’s a diagram of the double helix of DNA, and all that points down toward a human being, a little stick figure. Toward one side of the human being is the population of earth, and to the other side of the human being is a diagram showing how tall we are. So whether or not they get all of the little details, that’s really secondary. They’ll see that we want to be simple; we want to be somewhat elegant. There are a lot of things that message says about us as human beings that we had never intended.

We’ll hear more about messaging outer space in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. You can hear this and previous programs on our podcast.

The Arecibo Message

Reaching out to ET, in ones and zeroes.

Air Date:10/11/2017

Scientist:

Transcript:

The Arecibo Message

In 1974 a message was beamed into space from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, one of the very few such messages that have ever been sent. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Doug Vakoch is president of METI International, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Vakoch: It was a message written in the language of math and science, simply a bunch of ones and zeros, pulses of slightly different frequencies, for about three minutes. And so it was a very brief message, but if the extraterrestrials reconstruct it correctly, they'll see that it's a two-dimensional diagram that gives an introduction to the chemistry that's important to life on earth, something about ourselves, our solar system.

Just like early television was transmitted by rows of black and white dots, this message conveyed a visual image represented by rows of ones and zeroes.

Vakoch: At the top of the Arecibo message are the numbers from one to ten, written in binary, the simplest numbering system. Then underneath that, there's a description of five chemical elements that are essential to life on earth. Then there's a diagram of the double helix of DNA, and all that points down toward a human being, a little stick figure. Toward one side of the human being is the population of earth, and to the other side of the human being is a diagram showing how tall we are. So whether or not they get all of the little details, that's really secondary. They'll see that we want to be simple; we want to be somewhat elegant. There are a lot of things that message says about us as human beings that we had never intended.

We'll hear more about messaging outer space in future programs. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. You can hear this and previous programs on our podcast.