What is Today’s Google doodle, that no one understanding?

NP NEWS 24 ONLINE – Today 44 years back, was the 1st time that mankind tried to contact with intelligent life beyond our planet. Google is also celebrating this special day by making a Doodle for this. Arecibo Message was the name of this project.

When the Arecibo message was sent into space in 1974 – blasting the most powerful signal ever broadcast deep into the universe – it was a pioneering attempt to reach out to aliens, wherever they might be.

The Arecibo Message is a 1974 interstellar radio message carrying basic information about humanity and Earth sent to globular star cluster M13 in a hope that extra-terrestrial intelligence might receive and decipher it.

When a response came back in 2001, it was a hoax that showed just how much some people hope we can actually communicate with extra-terrestrials. But that fake reply might actually be the message we ever get back from aliens.

“Their three-minute radio message — a series of exactly 1,679 binary digits (a multiple of two prime numbers) which could be arranged in a grid 73 rows by 23 columns — was aimed at a cluster of stars 25,000 light years away from earth,” Google said.

Stephen Hawking, for instance, famously said that we should be wary of sending out messages into the universe for fear that they could be answered by someone looking to wipe us out – or, perhaps worse, someone who might wipe us out purely by accident. “‘If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said in a 2010 documentary.

In the message, the bits are arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line (these are both prime numbers, and may help the aliens decode the message). The rectangular grid of 0s and 1s form a pictograph representing human DNA, some fundamental facts of mathematics, Earth’s position in the solar system and a picture of a human-like figure along with an image of the telescope itself.

As of now, the message would have traveled only 259 trillion miles.