One of the most famous messages ever beamed to space was a string of 1,679 bits sent by the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974. But if E.T. sent us such a string, how could we Earthlings even begin to decode it? A new mathematical approach proposes a way.
For anyone trying to interpret the Arecibo message — a drawing depicting a person, the DNA double helix, the solar system and the telescope itself, among other information — they’d first have to understand that it was an image at all, and that the image was 23 pixels wide and 73 pixels tall.
As it sent the signal, the radio antenna encoded the 1,679 bits by flipping between two different frequencies, representing one and zero respectively. If you line the bits up differently — placing more or fewer than 23 pixels per row — the image looks like a random mess.
We’d face a similar challenge if aliens sent us a message. How would we know the number and size of its dimensions?
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