The skies above us today, not so unlike the world which lay just over the African horizon two million years ago, invite our best efforts to pursue, with renewed conviction and better means, those answers we instinctively seek. As Carl Sagan so eloquently stated, we are indeed “star stuff contemplating the stars.” Communicating with other civilizations is the logical goal of Sagan’s proclamation. While the nearly inconceivable vastness of interstellar space may be humbling, rather than deterring humanity from pressing ever forward with our quest to communicate beyond our home world it should be taken to heart as a challenge. Constrained by the universal speed limit of light in vacuum, the electromagnetic waves conveying the Arecibo Message have traversed less than 0.2% of the distance to their intended target. Standing out among these first bold attempts, though, is the Arecibo Message, transmitted in 1974 as a beamed radio signal at wavelength 126 mm towards the M13 globular cluster some 25,000 lightyears distant. We have also sent signals, both by radio and by the far slower physical couriers Pioneer and Voyager, to any beings who may share the Milky Way galaxy with us. Despite a few false alarms such as the first detection of what turned out to be pulsars in the 1960s and the “WOW Signal” in 1977, we have listened with increasingly sophisticated technology for any utterance from a far-flung “other”. Driven by broader inquiry, ancient scholars gazed at the stars wheeling through the vault of night and inevitably confronted what is perhaps the most profound of all questions: are we alone, or are those points of light in the sky home to others we may yet come to know? It would take five millennia to progress from the use of simplistic symbols such as Sumerian cuneiform to the great radio telescopes of the 20th and 21st centuries-and with that, the means to finally begin seeking out an answer.Įven before the first exoplanet discovery was confirmed in 1995, attempts at listening for signals of extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) origin, as well as sending signals of our own, were well underway. With the watershed inventions of written language, mathematics, and the scientific method, generational construction of complex ideas, concepts, and innovations became possible. As survival gave way to dominance, attained at such cost, humanity’s path toward civilization lay open. Cooperation facilitated by rudimentary grunts and gestures may well have been the difference between extinction on the African veldt and eventual mastery of the Earth. Since the first faint flickering of sentience dawned in the primal minds of modern humans’ distant ancestors some hundred thousand generations ago, we have sought to communicate. These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo’s legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth’s technological civilization. Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely location for life to have developed. The message concludes with digitized images of the human form, along with an invitation for any receiving intelligences to respond. The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface. An updated, binary-coded message has been developed for transmission to extraterrestrial intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy.
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