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Allow me to introduce you to a traitor: Frank Drake—no relation to Francis Drake, Drake,
or Drake.
As the documentary Avengers: Infinity War taught us, it’s only a matter of time before
some alien decides to start a war against mankind, but Frank here decided it would be
a super awesome idea to send aliens a message that includes a bunch of information about
humans, thus making our soon-to-be alien overlords’ job even easier.
Now, Dr. Drake claims that it was a peaceful message meant to “communicate human technological
achievement,” but look at this face: he’s obviously a stone-cold traitor who’s hoping
that he’ll get rewarded when Thanos finally arrives.
Drake’s message, called the Arecibo message, because of reasons, was sent in 1974 via FM
radio waves, as 1,679 bits of data.
Why 1,679?
Well, apart from it having a great second and fourth digit, it’s also a semi-prime—divisible
only by itself, one, and the primes 73 and 23, which is the key to decoding it.
If you turn the ones into blocks and arrange them in 73 rows by 23 columns, you get this:
the Arecibo message.
But, of course, looking at it, you less get the impression that humanity is a scientifically
advanced race, and more that humanity is a six-year old who got a Lite-Brite for Christmas.
Turns out that even once you’ve managed to decode it enough to put it into this format,
you then have to decode it again.
It’s like doing a crossword puzzle where every clue is hidden inside of a Sudoku, an
incredibly frustrating experience I’m sure our soon to be alien rulers totally won’t
punish us for.
So, let’s break down all the secrets Drake slipped to the Predator.
The message starts off the same way that Nevada tabulates election results: slowly counting
to ten and then stopping.
It does so in binary code, mainly to show the aliens the binary code system the rest
of the message will be in, and to see if the aliens studied for their AP comp sci final.
If you’re not already a big-brain binary boi, I’ll explain: think of binary like
a long list of numbers at increasing powers of two, and you just make a mark under each
one you want someone to add together to get the number you’re aiming for.
So this is zero, this is one, this is two, this is three: one and two added together.
Now, the Arecibo message could only go three rows high, so 8, 9, and 10’s binary representation
continues in a second column started to the right of those numerals, and there’s an
extra mark under the column that denotes the least significant digit.
Now I truly have no idea what the words I just said mean, I just read what’s
put in front of me, but hold onto your hats, because it’s about to get way worse.
The next thing Drake decided to do was teach the aliens about our DNA, because hey, why
make them figure out how to mutate us all on their own?
It starts off by just listing out, in binary, the numbers 1, 6, 7 ,8 , and 15, which are
the atomic numbers of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, respectively, thus
developing a shorthand that the leftmost column is hydrogen, the second is nitrogen, etc.
Then, using that shorthand, the message goes on to show the nucleotides that make up DNA.
This, for example, is deoxyribose: 5 of carbon, 7 of hydrogen, and one oxygen, and then, the
message makes a little set of DNA.
On the left and right sides are Deoxyribose and Phosphate, which make up the backbone
of DNA, and then in between, they have the four nucleobases, put into their pairs: adenine
with thymine, and cytosine with guanine.
Below is just a little picture of a double helix, which gives a hint to the aliens that
the above stuff is about DNA, shows that we know what a double helix looks like, and shows
that for some reason our greatest scientists couldn’t manage to draw symmetrical curves.
In the middle is a binary representation of the number 4,294,441,822, which back then
we thought was the number of nucleotide pairs in the human genome.
It turns out we were wrong, and it’s actually about 3.2 billion, but hey, who cares if you’re
a billion off; it’s not like this message was specifically designed to prove our species’
intelligence.
After that, yup, that’s exactly what it looks like: an adorable little human self-portrait,
which we all have to hope the aliens figure out stops here and not here, lest they think
we all look like Stewie Griffin.
To the right is binary for 4.3 billion, which was the population at the time, so the aliens
will know exactly how big an army they’ll need to send to kill us all, and to the left
is a horizontal binary of the number 14, with a little line going up to indicate that 14
refers to height.
14 whats, you may wonder?
The answer is found in the wavelength the message was sent through—2,380 Megahertz,
or about 12.6 centimeters.
12.6 times 14 is 176.4 cm, which is the approximate average height of a human man, because sexism
doesn’t even stop in space!
Next is a cute little graphic of the solar system, with the sun and then the eight planets
and then a conspiracy theory called Pluto.
They’re done in a very rough approximation of size, with, for example, Mars as one block
and Jupiter as three to show Jupiter is bigger, and Earth is offset by one to show where to
shoot the Death Star laser.
Finally, is a big letter M, in honor of the 2010 Dreamworks hit Megamind, and also to
represent the curved concave mirror of the Arecibo radio telescope, which sent the message.
Below it is binary of the number 2,430, which, with another wavelength conversion, indicates
the size of the antenna as 306.18 meters.
There is one spot of good news: the Arecibo message was sent to the globular star cluster
M13, 25,000 light years away.
That means it’ll take 25 millennia to arrive, giving ourselves plenty of time to come together
as a species and prepare ourselves for alien warfare, or more realistically, to wipe out
all human life ourselves because we wanted to drive big shiny cars that went vroom.
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