Having spent years now looking into space hoping that someone will speak to us from the void humans have just began to realize that perhaps it will be up to us to send the message, but this leads to a question. How do you introduce yourself to an alien species?
Let’s assume for the sake of simplicity that we can send a message that they will be able to understand or decipher? Do you send them poetry?, The Bible?, Music?, Art? Perhaps you send them books on philosophy or the works of Einstein. Perhaps humor would bridge the gap between species?
This is a question that scientists have considered and several answers have come. One of the most basic is the Arechbo message, sent into space on November 16th 1974 it was written by Francis Drake and Carl Sagan and may be the first message anyone in the cosmos hears from us.
This message comes in 7 parts.
The first exists to help the aliens who receive the message to understand. To this end it is the most basic universal knowledge we have. In binary the message counts from 1 to 10.
Next we make a more profound statement of our understanding and help them to understand the message isn’t random. So, we put the atomic numbers of the elements Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, oxygen and Phosphorus. These are the basic building blocks of DNA and so a clever alien might recognize that this is what we are made of.
The message continues to show our DNA by giving the numbers for the sugars and bases in DNA, then goes on to show the number of nucleotides in DNA and its Helix structure. Further explaining ourselves we have a picture of man, A graph of our solar system, with earth raised above the others and a picture of the satellite that sent the message.
With only 210 bytes to work with the two scientists crammed in a remarkably large amount of information into this first message.
Later messages have become more inflated, and contests have been held to see what information should go into the beamed messages.
In addition to beaming messages we have sent out two other messages into the void. Each of the voyager spacecrafts have a golden record. This record includes greetings from earth in 55 different languages, sounds of many of the animals and objects of our earth including whales, trains and a mother kissing her child. This is followed by a 90 minute selection of music which includes Beethoven’s 5th symphony and Johnny B. Good by Chuck Berry among many others. Finally there is an hour long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan.
Most of the messages humans have sent out have been short, or on probes so small that them ever being found is highly unlikely. Still, the choice of these ideas, of what we choose to say about ourselves to life somewhere else in the universe also tells us what we think of ourselves, what we find important and perhaps allows us a new perspective on humanity.
