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The Arecibo Message – Earth’s Interstellar Brand Launch
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Arecibo Message.
Think of it like humankind’s interstellar brand launch.
The Arecibo Message was our first intentional broadcast beyond our solar system.
The binary code was designed to encapsulate what Earth and the human race are all about. In 1974, astronomers sent it in the direction of the Messier 13 globular cluster.
The message offers important lessons for today’s communicators around simplicity and knowing your audience.
It contains seven sections, each designed to communicate something about our existence. Entries include atomic numbers of key elements, a graphic of DNA’s double helix structure, the dimensions of the Arecibo radio telescope antenna, and a graphic figure of a human.
Astronomers only had 210 bytes to work with. For reference, this paragraph is about the size of a 210-byte file.
Is This Thing On?
Like the Voyager missions that would follow, the Arecibo Message was as much for human audiences as it was for faraway alien civilizations.
Here’s science historian Rebecca Charnonneau:
“I think of the Arecibo message in this grand tradition of attempts at communicating with ET or transmitting things into space that are fundamentally messages, at least in part, to Earth as well.”
It was also a demonstration of new features at the Arecibo Observatory. The transmission was the final act of an event celebrating upgrades made to the observatory’s transmitter and reflector dish.
Anyone eager for feedback on the message or a response will be waiting for a while. The message has traveled 50 light years to date, but will take at least 25,000 years to reach its final destination.
