Dear Aliens, From Earth

Ever thought how we would communicate with aliens in real life? If yes, one of the famous movies to depict this is the Steven Spielberg's magical movie E.T. What if I say that our very own people are trying to replicate the idea of contacting these Extraterrestrials? Yes, you heard it right! E.T. in real life!!

The SETI institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a non-profit research organization whose main motive is to explore, understand, and explain the nature of life in the universe. One of the program, the institute has taken is to communicate with these extraterrestrials through the Arecibo message. Stephen Hawking, one of the great theoretical physicists announced reward for proving the existence of these extraterrestrial lives.

The Arecibo message is a 1974 interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth, sent to another globular star cluster M13 in the hope that extraterrestrial intelligence may receive and decipher it. This message was broadcasted into space on 16 November 1974.

The message consisted of 1,679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes. The total broadcast was less than three minutes. The number 1,679 was chosen because it is a semi prime (product of two prime numbers), It was arranged in a matrix of seventy-three rows by twenty-three columns. The message forms the image shown here when translated into graphics, characters, and spaces.

This program was initiated by Dr Frank Drake, the creator of the Drake equation who wrote this message with the help of Carl Sagan. The image given below is the digital representation of the signal:

The message had seven parts:

1. The numbers one to ten.

2. The atomic numbers of elements Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus which is present in DNA.

3. The formula of bases and sugars in DNA.

4. Number of nucleotides in DNA.

5. A graphic image of human.

6. A graphic of Solar System indicating which of the planets the message is coming from.

7. An image of Arecibo radio telescope.

Since, the distance is very large, it will take almost 25,000 years to reach M13 (and after that another 25,000 years to wait for reply), this is considered as one of the greatest achievement in technological field , rather than tying to communicate with aliens. It is assumed that the core of M13, where the message was aimed, may not be in the same location when the message arrives.

Even if the aliens get this message, it would be difficult for them to decipher and understand the message and wait for almost additional 25,000 years for their replies. The main objective that this experiment achieved is to minimize the technological gap and send messages through space. Who knows, even the aliens could have sent us the message which would be on its way to earth!!