Seventeen years ago, on November
16, 1974, the people of the planet Earth sent a
purposeful message to interstellar space. Using a giant
radio telescope in Puerto Rico, we beamed up a 3-minute
message about ourselves to anyone listening in a cluster
of stars in the constellation Hercules.
We told them all about the solar system we live in, about
the population of the world at the time, and about the
atomic elements we're made of. We haven't heard back from
anyone.
Moving outward, our message has traveled 17 light years so far, nearly four times the
distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri,
but needs at least another 24,983 years to get to the
300,000 closely packed stars in the Hercules cluster.
Then it will be another 25,000 before we should expect to
hear anything back.
Finding a signal from the great beyond would be
momentous, a turning point. Definitely finding that there
existed intelligent life elsewhere in our Universe would
perhaps be the greatest event in all of human history. |
