ET: Check your voicemail
Alien beings on faraway planets may not have noticed, but it’s been 35 years since human beings made the first deliberate effort to send them a message. In 1974, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, both working at Cornell University at the time, used the world’s biggest and most powerful radiotelescope to transmit the one-of-a-kind 3-minute message. It consisted of 1,679 bits — ones and zeroes — and was cleverly designed to produce a simple image revealing something about the size and shape of humans, the solar system, the dish that sent the message, and even about the biochemistry of our bodies.Joe Davis, a research affiliate in MIT’s biology department and a former artist-in-residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, decided that the Earth’s first broadcast to aliens was an event worth commemorating, and set out to find an appropriate way of marking the occasion. Earlier this month,...