![]() ![]() A message might be a database in which each element is not just a value but a list of values, or a list of lists. But alien messages could come in many forms and have many dimensions, says Brian McConnell, a computer scientist at Notion Labs in San Francisco, and author of The Alien Communication Handbook. The Arecibo scientists built a clue into the transmission: 23 and 73 are prime numbers - a scheme other intelligent life might recognize, if they too find primes to be interesting. How would we know the number and size of its dimensions? We’d face a similar challenge if aliens sent us a message. If you line the bits up differently - placing more or fewer than 23 pixels per row - the image looks like a random mess. ![]() Johannes Rössel/Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 3.0)Īs it sent the signal, the radio antenna encoded the 1,679 bits by flipping between two different frequencies, representing one and zero respectively. The Arecibo message, beamed from Earth in 1974, was sent as 1,679 bits that created an image 23 pixels wide and 73 pixels tall (color added here to show the parts of the message). ![]()
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