In this new era in the hunt for alien life, Arecibo Observatory researchers launched a competition in 2018 to compose an updated message. This time, a new generation of scientists had the tantalizing yet daunting task of summing up humanity to an extraterrestrial audience.
A team of then undergraduate students from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez won the contest and took cues from the original message, using the same binary digit system and a similar schematic of the solar system as they drafted a new one. “We were inspired by the original,” says team member Kelby Palencia-Torres of Toa Alta.
To expand on the previous communication, the team also included a map that pinpoints the location of Earth within the Milky Way galaxy and highlights some of the interesting cosmic objects in our solar system, such as Saturn’s rings and our lunar companion. (Of course, they updated the solar system to exclude Pluto from the planets depicted.) The proposed transmission also features physical constants like Planck’s constant and the speed of light, as well as basic mathematical operators.
The original message included information about DNA and amino acids, which some argue could be sensitive information to disclose to potentially predatory aliens. This time around, the team kept information about humans at a minimum, only including a visual representation of humans with average height and the world’s population.
The Music of the Last Arecibo MessageAs part of the 50th anniversary celebrations, scientists decided to include a musical component as part of the new message. They worked with a Puerto Rican composer named Ángel Vázquez to create a piece titled Meraki.
Andrew Hernández, Ángel Vázquez, and the Caribbean Film Orchestra
“It was very interesting what has to be accomplished so that a message not only reaches the [chosen] destination… but also how to make the message sufficiently simple, communicate exactly what we want and how to make sure that it is not misinterpreted,” says team member Cesar Quiñones Martínez of San Sebastian.