Arecibo Message: Google Doodle celebrates 44th anniversary of mankind's first attempt to contact interstellar life

tech2 News StaffNov 16, 2018 10:07:26 IST

Today's Google Doodle is celebrating the 44th anniversary of the Arecibo message sent in 1974 for letting any extra-terrestrial life know that we are also a part of the universe.

Arecibo message Google Doodle.

A group of scientists had gathered near the Arecibo Observatory located in the tropical forests of Puerto Rico to let the cosmos know of our presence. The Arecibo message happens to be a three-minute long radio signal consisting of 1,679 binary digits which could be arranged in a grid 73 rows by 23 columns. The message was written by the late Carl Sagan along with Dr. Frank Drake and many others.

Although the message is intended to receive by any other intelligent life in the universe, the signal was aimed at a star cluster M-13 which happens to be 25,000 light years away from earth.

The Aricebo radio telescope had a diameter of 1000-feet and it had an antenna which was 305 meters long, making it the most powerful radio transmission device at that time.

"Since the Arecibo Message will take roughly 25,000 years to reach its intended destination (a group of 300,000 stars in the constellation Hercules known as M13), humankind will have to wait a long time for an answer. How long? In the 44 years since it was first transmitted, the message has traveled only 259 trillion miles (416 trillion kilometers), only a tiny fraction of the 146,965,638,531,210,240 or so miles (23,651,826,857,6372,032 kilometers) to its final destination," Google explained.