5/15/2023 0 Comments Civ 6 on towards the stars![]() ![]() This is the approximate number of characters (“base-pairs”) in a human genetic sequence. Then, he drew a depiction of double helical DNA, wrapped around “3 billion” written in binary code. A 3-minute transmission at 10 bits of information per second meant he had at most 1,800 squares to play with. We do that all the time, with great results.” Black and Whiteĭad set up a grid and drew crude shapes and symbols by shading in squares. “From day one, I’ve always thought pictures work,” Dad says. ![]() ![]() So how does one compose a missive with the best chance of being universally understood? And things like distance measurements are just as arbitrary as words. Numbers and equations, while more concrete, are still written using arbitrary symbols. The chances of an alien civilization understanding, “Hi, we live on Earth and are friendly,” are vanishingly small, just like your chances of understanding “Vie minut johtajanne luo” are practically zero unless you speak Finnish. Aside from the question of what to say, there’s the issue of how to say it.įor starters, not just any language will work – think about how difficult it is to understand the many languages spoken on Planet Earth. Sending a message to other worlds, while simple in principle, becomes almost impossibly complex when it’s time to actually write the letter. Texting Aliensįortunately, Dad had been thinking about how to write postcards to aliens for a while. But it was a secret – only the ceremony’s organizers knew ahead of time what would happen, and they envisioned a transmission lasting about 3 minutes. Beamed into space by the Observatory’s powerful, one million-watt transmitter, the message would cap a ceremony marking the completion of the improvements (you can listen to it being sent, below). It was 1974, and the Arecibo Observatory’s giant radio telescope had just gotten a major upgrade. “And it was also a message to ourselves in that it showed what an intelligent civilization can do to contact other civilizations.”ĭad had been given just one month to write Earth’s first radio greeting to the stars. “It was a message that would actually inform anyone who did receive it that we existed, and tell them a little bit about what we were like,” says my dad Frank, who had the responsibility of constructing and sending what’s now known as the Arecibo Message. Meant to be decipherable by extraterrestrial beings, the message contained some key information about the species that had sent it. Unlike the radio signals that had been leaking from Earth since the late 1930s, this postcard was the first deliberate transmission to an alien civilization. In about 25,000 years, it will collide with a cluster of more than 300,000 stars. The message left our home planet on a warm and sticky day in Puerto Rico and has been flying through the galaxy at the speed of light ever since. 16, 1974, Earth beamed its first postcard to the stars. ![]()
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