The Arecibo Image (decoded)

By Jack Brummet, alien lore ed.

Like the famous gold record on board the Voyager, the Arecibo message is yet another attempt to contact our cousins Out There.  The Arecibo Image is a short binary message the U.S. beamed into outer space. When decoded, it creates an image like something from a 1980's videogame.

Dr. Frank Drake, of Cornell University, wrote the message, with help from Carl Sagan, and others. The encoded message has seven parts. 

It will take 25,000 years for the message to reach its target of of stars (and, presumably, an additional 25,000 years for the return trip for any reply). Interestingly, the stars the message is aimed at will no longer be there when it arrives. According to a Cornell News press release of Nov. 12, 1999, the real purpose of the message was not to make contact, but to demonstrate the capabilities of newly installed equipment.

Here is a key explaining the various parts of the image.

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Alien Lore Mo. 234 - The sounds and music we sent into deep space on the Voyager (1977)

By Jack Brummet, NASA and Alien Lore Editor

The picture on the left went into space with our early interstellar craft (The Pioneers). It explains where earth is, what homo sapiens sort of looked like naked (like Barbie and Ken), and other information, like a diagram indicating the location of our sun. 

Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) worked on this "Interstellar Outreach Program" for many years. The gold-plated disk is from the two Voyager craft, launched after the Pioneer.  It is a bronze record containing sounds and images of life on earth. Each of the two Voyagers is equipped with a record player of sorts--with a cartridge, even--to play the disk, and recover the images. 

The two circles in the bottom right side of the record show the two lowest states of a hydrogen atom. The vertical lines on the circles show the spin moment of the electron and proton. And (is this cool, or what?) "the transition time from one state to the next provides the fundamental clock reference used in ALL the cover diagrams and the images to be decoded from binaries."  [Ed's note: Obviously, they're not expecting a dork like me to find the record laying around somewhere in the future].

Carl Sagan and a team of other folks designed and selected the Voyager's messages and data. The disk includes a greeting in 55 different languages, from Aramaic to Vietnamese. The record also includes a sampler of non-human Earth sounds such as wind, rain, surf, chimps, sheep, crickets, saws, and trains. It contains photos as well, and maps, diagrams of DNA, vertebrate anatomy charts, chemical and mathematical definitions, and other visual displays. The disk includes Beethoven, a Chuck Berry tune (Johnny B, Goode), Bach and Mozart, a Navajo chant, Indian Ragas, and a Louis Armstrong recording. There are 116 binary images on the record. 

No one know if the aliens who find this will be able to use it, or decode the information. Will they even have hands? Opposable thumbs? Will they even think in any path parallel to ours? Will the disk just look like gibberish to them? Their scientists--if they have science (and we assume they must)--may need to study the disk for a couple of thousand years before they make a breakthrough. 

A book titled Murmurs of the Earth, written by Sagan and colleagues, was reissued in 1992 with a CD-ROM compilation of the Golden Record, and a description of its creation. It's out of print, but you can pick up a copy fairly cheaply. 


Don't hold your breath that any of our cousins in other galaxies will find this and come to visit. The Voyager will not come close to another star for something like 40,000 years. But then again, when you're dealing with our alien cousins Out There, 40,000 years may just be a sneeze in the winds of time. 


Sounds included on the Voyager record:

• Music of The Spheres (WTF is this!?)
• Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder
• Mud Pots
• Wind, Rain, Surf
• Crickets, Frogs
• Birds, Hyena, Elephant
• Chimpanzee
• Wild Dog
• Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter
• Fire, Speech
• The First Tools
• Tame Dog
• Herding Sheep, Blacksmith, Sawing
• Tractor, Riveter
• Morse Code, Ships
• Horse and Cart
• Train
• Tractor, Bus, Auto
• F-111 Flyby, Saturn 5 Lift-off
• Kiss, Mother and Child
• Life Signs, Pulsar

Music:

• Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
• Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
• Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
• Zaire, Pygmy girls' initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
• Australia, Aborigine songs, "Morning Star" and "Devil Bird," recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
• Mexico, "El Cascabel," performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
• "Johnny B. Goode," written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
• New Guinea, men's house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
• Japan, shakuhachi, "Cranes in Their Nest," performed by Coro Yamaguchi. 4:51
• Bach, "Gavotte en rondeaux" from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
• Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
• Georgian S.S.R., chorus, "Tchakrulo," collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
• Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
• "Melancholy Blues," performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
• Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
• Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
• Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
• Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
• Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
• Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
• Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, "The Fairie Round," performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
• Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
• Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
• China, ch'in, "Flowing Streams," performed by Kuan P'ing-hu. 7:37
• India, raga, "Jaat Kahan Ho," sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
• "Dark Was the Night," written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
• Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet 6:37

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The Crypt of Civilization

By Jack Brummet
Paranormal and Unexplained Phenomena Editor

The Crypt of Civilization is an airtight chamber situated at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.  The chamber is filled with artifacts specially preserved for the long haul.  It is "scheduled" to be opened in the year 8113.  The 1990 Guinness Book of World Records calls the crypt the "first successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth."  They even included generators, power sources, and various media players in order for the discoverers to be able to dig right in. 

That's probably true, although we did send off the Voyager into deep space with some of the same sorts of artifacts, in hopes they might be discovered many many centuries from now.  We sent a golden "record" and a player that contained all sorts of photographic and audio information about us, and how we live.  You can read an article on the golden record on All This Is That that we published six years ago.

The Crypt of Civilization chamber sits on Appalachian granite bedrock located in the foundation of Phoebe Hearst Memorial Hall at Oglethorpe University.  The room was converted from a swimming pool from 1937 to 1940 and the walls were lined with enamel plates.

The crypt contains airtight receptacles with microfilm on cellulose acetate film with 800 classic works of literature, including the Bible, the Koran, Homer's Iliad, and Dante's Inferno. There are approximately 640,000 pages included, as well as audio recordings and other cultural bits and pieces.  The Crypt room is 20 feet long, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide  under a stone roof seven feet thick and over a two-foot stone floor.   It is sealed with a stainless steel door welded in place.

Wow.

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Alien Lore. No. 172 - Is The Voyager 2 overrun with Greys 8.5 billion miles from earth?

Thanks to Jeff Clinton...for the alien lore news tip. 

Hartwig Hausdorf, an author of several books and German UFO expert recently said that a NASA spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens, who are now attempting to contact Earth.

Hausdorf claims that Voyager 2, an un-manned probe we fired into space 33 years ago, is transmitting unintelligible signals from aliens who are now attempting to contact Earth.

After the erratic signals from the ship, the Voyager 2 went silent on April 22nd.  NASA told reporters that engineers were working to solve a data transmission fault.  NASA's only comment on the alien story are that the fault is a glitch in the probe's computer memory.  You may remember that Steven Hawking recently warned us to quit trying to contact aliens (because they would likely not arrive here with the noblest of intentions).

Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Thirty years later they are the most distant human-made objects in outer space.  Scientists say that the Voyager 1 is more than 8.5 billion miles from Earth and will soon leave the heliosphere (the sun's bubble) for interstellar space.  Each vessel contain a disk for whoever might find them with music, images, mathematical formulas, cultural artifacts, and greetings in 55 languages. Maybe the Greys didn't like what they saw and heard??   Or it was a Valentine from a planet ripe for plunder.

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Alien Lore No. 138 — Messages to our cousins in the cosmos

For the last forty years or so, we've beamed messages into the cosmos in hopes of contacting our cousins—if we actually have cousins—way Out There. We take our best guess and fire off something we hope they're smart enough to decode or understand. Some of this stuff is pretty strange, to say the least.


photo courtesy of Nasa/Jet Propulsion Lab

The Pioneer Plaques are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. With a picture of the solar system (which they would presumably understand), a picture of the Pioneer, and a picture of "a hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen," we were sure that whoever was smart enough to recover our spacecraft would Get It.


The Pioneer Plaque attached to Voyager 10, photo courtesy of Nasa/Jet Propulsion Lab

According to NASA, The Pioneer Plaque "is designed to show scientifically educated inhabitants of some other star system, who might intercept it millions of years from now, when Pioneer was launched, from where, and by what kind of beings. (With the hope that they would not invade Earth.) The design is etched into a 6 inch by 9 inch gold-anodized aluminum plate, attached to the spacecraft's attenna support struts in a position to help shield it from erosion by interstellar dust. The radiating lines at left represents the positions of 14 pulsars, a cosmic source of radio energy, arranged to indicate our sun as the home star of our civilization. The "1-" symbols at the ends of the lines are binary numbers that represent the frequencies of these pulsars at the time of launch of Pioneer F relative of that to the hydrogen atom shown at the upper left with a "1" unity symbol. The hydrogen atom is thus used as a "universal clock," and the regular decrease in the frequencies of the pulsars will enable another civilization to determine the time that has elapsed since Pioneer F was launched. The hydrogen is also used as a "universal yardstick" for sizing the human figures and outline of the spacecraft shown on the right. The hydrogen wavelength, about 8 inches, multiplied by the binary number representing "8" shown next to the woman gives her height, 64 inches. The figures represent the type of creature that created Pioneer. The man's hand is raised in a gesture of good will. Across the bottom are the planets, ranging outward from the Sun, with the spacecraft trajectory arching away from Earth, passing Mars, and swinging by Jupiter."

The Voyager Record, is literally a metal record...an LP...a long-player. It even includes Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode."


Photograph of the Voyager Record photo courtesy of Nasa/Jet Propulsion Lab

The 12 inch gold-plated copper discs contain "greetings in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural and man-made sounds from Earth. They also contain electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams and photographs. Currently, both Voyager probes are sailing adrift in the black sea of interplanetary space, having left our solar system years ago."

The Arecibo Image is a short binary message beamed into space. When decoded, it creates an image that looks similar to an 80's video game.

Dr. Frank Drake, of Cornell University, wrote the message, with help from Carl Sagan, and others. The encoded message has seven parts:

1) the numbers one (1) through ten (10):

2) the atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus which make up DNA

3) the formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA/the number of nucleotides in DNA

4) a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA

5) a graphic figure of a man, the dimension (physical height) of an average man, and the human population of Earth

6) a graphic of Earth's solar system

7) a graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the dimension (the physical diameter) of the transmitting antenna dish. [Ed's note: Arecibo in Puerto Rico sends messages to the universe, and is the site where SETI attempts to track blips in the universe and link them to other intelligent beings.]

It will take 25,000 years for the message to reach its target of of stars (and, presumably, an additional 25,000 years for the return trip for any reply). Interestingly, the stars the message is aimed at will no longer be there when it arrives. According to a Cornell News press release of Nov. 12, 1999, the real purpose of the message was not to make contact, but to demonstrate the capabilities of newly installed equipment.

The Teenage Message was beamed into space in 2001. It starts with some radio-transmission Doppler-tuning and then segues into theremin music, and ends with more binary images, including a logo for the Teenage Message program itself.




According to SETI, in 2001, "a group of Russian teens from Moscow, Kaluga, Voronezh, and Zheleznogorsk participated directly and via the Internet in composing a Teen-Age Message (TAM) to extraterrestrial intelligence, and in the selection of target stars. Their messa was transmitted in the Autumn of that year, from the Evpatoria Deep Space Center."

"Two previous interstellar radio messages (IRM), one transmitted from Arecibo in 1974 and the one from Evpatoria in 1999, had digital format and represented binary scans of one (Are) or 23 (Evp) black-and-white stylized images. But one might suppose that transmission of analog IRMs is also possible. So, before composing the message's content (as well as trying to decode future signals from ETI), let us try to determine such a message's possible format and structure."

Television Signals are a longstanding science fiction trope in which greys, or "Martians," or aliens intercept television shows and are so impressed with a show that it becomes the basis for their entire civilization. You may have seen some variation of this story on The Twilight Zone. If our TV signals really do become extraterrestrial messages, who wouldn't love to see the results?



I'd like to see the Hee Haw or the Andy Griffith Show as the basis of a civilization, or maybe Celebrity Boxing, F Troop, The Beverly Hillbillies, My Mother The Car, or maybe even Cop Rock.
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