UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

We’ve loudly been broadcasting our presence on Earth out to the broader universe for decades. At first, these attempts were accidental. In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, he speculated that any aliens watching the stars with at least as keen an interest as we do would pick up high-powered television broadcasts — the first of which would have been Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.

Fortunately, we’ve also been sending more intentional messages into space that E.T. may pay more attention to. These deliberate messages often contain information on our technological advancement; our understanding of mathematics, which is likely the only shared form of communication we would have with an alien species; and our culture and art. Together, they represent how humanity wants to be seen. Here’s a selection of some of the most noteworthy messages we’ve been sending to space in the hopes that somebody is listening.

Alien Message Poster the Arecibo Message and Reply Poster ET - Etsy

The Arecibo Message with added color information.

Wikimedia Commons

1. The Arecibo Message

On November 16th, 1974, we sent a 2,380 MHz radio message pointed at the Messier M13 globular cluster 25,000 light years away. Over the course of its 3 minutes, the radio message sent 1,679 binary digits by shifting the radio’s signal frequency slightly for a 1 or a 0. When visualized, the Arecibo Message looks a little bit like discarded artwork from Space Invaders.

Like most of these messages, we tried to pack as much meaning in as little space as possible. Frank Drake (creator of the famous Drake equation) and Carl Sagan collaborated on what should go into it. From top to bottom, the message contains the numbers 1 through 10, information on the elements in our DNA, their atomic numbers, the nucleotides that constitute our DNA, and the double-helix structure. Below it, we listed the average height of a human, a simple graphic depicting our form, and our population at the time (4.3 billion). Then, there’s a simple model of our solar system, and the last part contains a depiction of a telescope.

It’ll take 25,000 years for the message to reach its destination, so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know if it made contact. However, its intended purpose was rather to demonstrate our capability; the possibility of contact is just the cherry on top.

Voyager’s Golden Record: Interpreting NASA’s message for alien life ...

The Voyager Golden Records prior to being affixed to the Voyager probes.

NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

2. The Voyager Golden Records

Probably the most famous communication attempt on this list, the Voyager Golden Records were contained inside the two Voyager probes launched in 1977. Once again, the contents were selected by Carl Sagan and a committee he helmed.

The records contain instructions on how they should be played. If aliens get past that step, they’ll be greeted by the sounds of planet Earth, like wind, thunder, and whale and bird song. They’ll also hear spoken greetings in 55 different languages, music from different cultures, footsteps, and Sagan’s laughter.

The Golden Records also contain instructions for how to produce images from their contents. These depict people eating, planets in our solar system, locations on Earth, animals, insects, human evolution and physiology, and chemistry-related images.

The most interesting component, though, is the hour-long recording of a human’s brainwaves; specifically, Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan. While her brain was being recorded, Druyan thought of a variety of topics, like Earth’s history and — having just gotten engaged to Carl Sagan — the experience of falling in love.

The Voyager probes were primarily meant to observe our solar system as they passed through, but they will be floating through space for quite some time. Maybe some aliens will have the opportunity to see how Druyan felt about falling in love or hear the many sounds from Earth we included. You can listen to the Golden Record’s audio recordings on Soundcloud here and here.

Message Sent Into Space (And What We've Heard Back) | Memorial Spaceflights

The Yevpatoria Planetary Radar.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

3. The Teen Age Message

This message was initially proposed to be sent via the Arecibo Observatory, the same radio telescope used to send the Arecibo Message, but was rejected over growing concerns that maybe it isn’t such a hot idea to broadcast humanity’s presence in the universe. The Dark Forest theory states that the reason why the universe appears empty is because all other alien life is hiding out fear of other, hostile civilizations — sending messages out to the stars has always been a contested proposition because of our ignorance about the friendliness of alien life.

But human perseverance and our desire to make contact with others has usually won out, and the Teen Age Message was eventually sent out from the Yevpatoria Planetary Radar in 2001. Alexander Zaitsev, the project’s leader, described his conception of the message:

There are two interconnected, inverse and direct, problems in concept of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) — Search for ETI by terrestrial intelligence (SETI) and Messages to ETI from terrestrial intelligence (METI). The key element of SETI is the Object of search, namely [the] Universe, where we hope to detect the ETI and then to decode theirs [sic] Messages, and so the essence of SETI is Space Science. In turn, the key element of METI is the intellectual Subject, who creates new messages for potential ETI and hope that They will detect and perceive these Messages, and so the essence of METI is Space Art.

In an attempt to make “space art,” the Teen Age Message contained the first live recording of a theremin concert for aliens. Seven songs were performed, and the total message was sent to six target stars, both of which were selected by teenage students (hence, the Teen Age Message). Depending on the star, the messages should reach their target destination between 2047 and 2070. (Far quicker than the 25,000 years the Arecibo Message will take!)

As an interesting side note, teenagers have played a fairly important role in our attempts at contacting alien life. When Sagan included “Johnny B. Good” on the Voyager Golden Records, critics complained that rock music was too adolescent. Sagan replied, “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet.”

Copy of the original computer printout, with the signal in the bottom left

The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". The original printout with Ehman's handwritten exclamation is preserved by Ohio History Connection.^[1]

Wikimedia Commons

4. The Wow! Reply

In 1977, the Big Ear radio observatory at Ohio State University picked up a signal coming from the constellation Sagittarius that was 30 times as powerful as the average background radiation of space. The signal was so striking that astronomer Jerry Ehman circled it in red ink on a printout and wrote “Wow!” in the margins, giving the signal its name.

To date, this is the strongest candidate for an intentional alien communication that we’ve received on Earth. For one, the signal’s frequency was beamed at around 1,420 MHz. Hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, also emits radiation at 1,420 MHz, making it an easily recognizable signal to any sufficiently advanced civilization. What’s more, when we studied alternative sources of the signal (i.e., an Earth-made signal reflected off of space debris, a signal emitted by distant comets), no theoretical sources matched the nature of the signal particularly well.

So, in 2012, 35 years after the first signal was detected, humanity sent a response. Ten thousand Twitter messages, including one from Stephen Colbert, were beamed back at the signal’s source.

Since alien life isn’t likely to be able to read Earth languages and may not even possess eyes to view the many videos and pictures included in the response, each message contained a repeating-sequence header to mark it as an intentional communication from intelligent life. The nearest sources of the Wow! signal were between 338 and 1,000 light years from Earth, however, so when the messages are finally received, both the hypothetical source civilization and humanity will be very different.

An aerial view of the Arecibo Observatory, which some may recognize from the 1997 film GoldenEye.

Flickr user NASA Blueshift

5. The New Arecibo Message

We’ve come along way since 1974, so it makes sense to send out more messages as we progress technologically and culturally. Currently, the Arecibo Observatory has challenged students to develop a new Arecibo Message. The observatory is asking teams of 10 students to create a message for alien civilizations, including the target stars and the energy of the signal. The Arecibo Observatory has also asked teams to in some way address the ongoing concerns over the risk of exposing humanity to unknown alien civilizations and communicate our peaceful intentions. After selecting the winners in September 2019, the new Arecibo Message will be beamed out to the broader universe in celebration of the 45th anniversary of the original message.

World Radio Day is celebrated on February 13. It was on this day in 1946 that UN Radio began its work. It tells people on all continents about peace and security. But radio waves can carry messages further than to the other side of the Earth. For 60 years now, people have been purposefully sending signals into space from powerful transmitters.

The message of the Arecibo telescope.

Source: displate.com

Our radio near other stars

Technically, radio waves can propagate in a vacuum indefinitely. But as the signal moves away from the source, its power decreases. Those transmitters with which the inventors conducted their experiments had extremely low signal intensity. In order to catch them at least on the Moon, a radio telescope was needed.

In addition, the first radio broadcasts did not carry words. It was just a flashing “there is a signal — there is no signal”. The premiere of the transmission of a voice radio signal took place in 1906, the first radio station began broadcasting in the USA in 1920, and the debut television company was launched in 1929.

Guglielmo Marconi demonstrates one of the first radio transmitters.

Source: Wikipedia

The signal of all these transmitters was strong enough for people to hear messages at a distance of hundreds and thousands of kilometers. But it was not directional, and therefore, at a distance of a hundred light-years, it would hardly be possible to hear it.

Radio transmitters that radiated a signal with a narrow beam appeared in the forties and quickly became more and more powerful. Their call signs could already be heard hundreds of light-years away. However, if anyone tried to listen to them, they wouldn’t have heard anything interesting. Because they were military radars, their signal carried no message and was perceived as noise.

How the idea of communication with space was born

The first signal purposefully sent into space should be considered the radar of the Moon, independently conducted by Hungarian and American scientists in 1946. Then the focused pulse was reflected from our moon and was picked up by an antenna on the Earth. Thanks to this experiment, the researchers learned many facts about the distance to the nearest celestial body and its physical characteristics.

The idea to send a meaningful message appeared in 1959. The scientific community had just accepted the idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life could really exist somewhere, and it could be contacted. This theory was expressed by the Italian physicist Giuseppe Cocconi and the American — Philip Morrison.

Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison.

Source: Wikipedia

American scientists who took an interest in this idea were faced with a very simple question. How alien life forms will understand what we want to say. Spoken words, signs on paper and just mathematical symbols make sense only to those who know their meaning. It took scientists a decade and a half of discussions to solve this problem.

Soviet message to Venus

But where the question of the understandability of words and ideas did not arise, it was in the USSR. On November 19, 1962, the word “Mir” (which means peace or world in Russian) was sent from the Yevpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications in the direction of Venus in Morse code.

By that time, scientists did not know whether any life could exist under a dense layer of clouds. But Soviet scientists were sure that the inhabitants of the second planet from the Sun would understand not only Morse code, but also the Russian language. Their conviction in this was so high that they decided to introduce the aliens to both the “most advanced in the world” Soviet state and its founder. On November 24, the words “Lenin” and “SSSR” (the Russian abbreviation for the Soviet Union) flew to Venus.

Radio complex in Yevpatoria.

Source: arc.construction

Arecibo Message

By the mid-1970s, Americans had finally decided on the content of the message and the tool for sending it. The giant Arecibo radio telescope on the island of Puerto Rico was ideal for this. The diameter of its plate is 305 meters. At that time, it was the most powerful of the directional transmitters created by man.

The message was sent into space on November 16, 1974. The globular cluster M13 was chosen as the target for it. The signal will reach its destination about in the year 25974. If at this time a representative of intelligent life turns out to be near one of its giant luminaries and responds to the message in the same way, then the signal will be sent to Earth for another 25 thousand years.

Arecibo’s message consisted of 1,679 prime numbers. 1 could be considered a point, 0 — a void. There were only two ways to make a rectangle out of them. And only in one of them the points of 1 formed a meaningful picture. In this picture, numbers from one to ten, information about the atoms of some chemical elements and other information were encrypted. The authors of the message were astronomers Carl Sagan and Francis Drake.

Transcript of Arecibo’s message.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Cosmic call

After the Arecibo message, people cooled down to the topic of messages to aliens for 25 years. In 1999, Yevpatoria became the main location of communication with space again. The international Cosmic Call project involved sending a much longer message to the stars, consisting of 1.7 million binary numbers. The coding principle was the same as that of Sagan and Drake.

The message included a small image of an encyclopedia and messages from earthlings. Anyone who paid USD 15 could get into their list. More than 50 thousand such people gathered, thanks to which it took place. Scientists have chosen four fairly close stars as the destination: 16 Cygni, HD 178428, 15 Sagittae and Gliese 777. The signal will reach the target between 2050 and 2070.

Messages of the XXI century

In 2001, scientists sent a so-called The Teen Age Message into space. It got its name because of the age of the participants. The signal had a complex structure. In addition to digital images, it also contained an analog recording of a theremin concert. They sent messages again from Yevpatoria.

In 2003, the second Cosmic Call took place. In total, during it and the The Teen Age Message, the signal was sent to 11 different stars. If they have intelligent life, then its representatives will receive these messages between 2045 and 2070.

Theremin-concert sent into space

After that, the scientists sent messages several more times. For example, A Message from Earth and Hello From Earth, which were sent in 2008 and 2009. They were interesting because more than half a million earthlings took part in their sending. From this mass, with the help of a contest on the Bebo social network, 501 messages were selected, which were sent into space.

Their target was the star Gliese 581 in the constellation Libra. One of the planets in this system is similar to Earth and is located in a habitable zone. The signal will get it already in 2029. Perhaps there will be someone who likes to listen to the radio.