A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Scientists do not join hands every Sunday and sing “Yes gravity is real! I know gravity is real! I will have faith! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!” If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about the concept.A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be seen, heard, understood, and touched by them. The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand, and touch another person.The content of the Arecibo message was designed by Frank Drake, then at Cornell University and creator of the Drake equation, who wrote the message with help from Carl Sagan and others.[1] The message was meant more as a demonstration of human technological achievement than a serious attempt to enter into a conversation with possible extraterrestrials.[1] As globular cluster M13, at which the message was aimed, is more than 25,000 light-years from Earth, the message, traveling at the speed of light, will take at least 25,000 years to arrive there. By that time, the core of M13 will no longer be in precisely the same location because of the orbit of the star cluster around the galactic center.[1] Even so, the proper motion of M13 is small, so the message will still arrive near the center of the cluster.[5]
The message consists of seven parts that encode the following (from the top down in the image):[4]
The entire message consisted of 1,679 binary digits, approximately 210 bytes, transmitted at a frequency of 2,380 MHz and modulated by shifting the frequency by 10 Hz, with a power of 450 kW. The "ones" and "zeros" were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes.[1][6]
The number 1,679 was chosen because it is a semiprime (the product of two prime numbers), to be arranged rectangularly as 73 rows by 23 columns.[7] The alternative arrangement, 23 rows by 73 columns, produces an unintelligible set of characters.
