The “Alien Message” Is Revisited 41 Years Later

Scientists at the Chilbolton Radio Observatory showed up to work as usual one morning in 2001, to discover the most detailed crop formation ever had appeared overnight in the wheat field next door. Overnight surveillance cameras didn’t see a thing.

Here is a great pic of center of galaxy Messier 13

nasapic

This is hard to believe but since no one can really prove where this came from, it is worthy of further discussion.  Plus this galaxy is 43,960 light years away so we would have had to send the message double that time ago to get a reply??  And here is a description of things from S.E.T.I.:

The broadcast was particularly powerful because it used Arecibo’s megawatt transmitter attached to its 305 meter antenna. The latter concentrates the transmitter energy by beaming it into a very small patch of sky. The emission was equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omnidirectional broadcast, and would be detectable by a SETI experiment just about anywhere in the galaxy, assuming a receiving antenna similar in size to Arecibo’s.

The message consists of 1679 bits, arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line (these are both prime numbers, and may help the aliens decode the message). The “ones” and “zeroes” were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes. A graphic showing the message is reproduced here. It consists, among other things, of the Arecibo telescope, our solar system, DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the biochemicals of earthly life. Although it’s unlikely that this short inquiry will ever prompt a reply, the experiment was useful in getting us to think a bit about the difficulties of communicating across space, time, and a presumably wide culture gap.

We hope you like the video and feel free to comment with your ideas on this controversial topic!

thanks to seti.org for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic



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