Crow, landing by me like one of those kinetic bombardment tungsten rods: I am ancient. I am all-seeing. I sat on the shoulders of gods, made friends with the wolf and picked clean the eyes of your brothers. I am the ever-shifting trickster and the croak at the back of Death's throat. I am darkness a-wing and night in the day.
Me: Baby! Your lunch is there, go mad.
Crow: ...
Me: ...
Crow: Ooh, raisins!
Walking dinosaur, Columbus Interactive Science Museum
The word radio was coined in 1907 after a decade of furious activity to discover the mechanism for wireless transmission. A decade earlier, French physicist Édouard Branly coined the term radioconductor to describe a means of wireless transmission. He based his term on the verb radiate which ultimately came from the Latin word radius meaning the spoke of a wheel, a ray or beam of light. The word radio was first used by itself in a 1907 article by Lee De Forest. It was used five years later by the Navy to distinguish it from other wireless technologies and entered common usage in the next decade. Radio technology advanced so quickly that a little over 50 years later on November 16, 1974, scientists broadcast the first interstellar radio message out to the stars, a program that later became known as METI, the Message to Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. To date, only 9 messages have been transmitted by a variety of organizations:
{The Morse Message (1962)}
Arecibo message (1974)
Cosmic Call 1 (1999)
Teen Age Message (2001)
Cosmic Call 2 (2003)
Across the Universe (2008)
A Message From Earth (2008)
Hello From Earth (2009)
RuBisCo Stars (2009)
Wow! Reply (2012)
The first radio message, known as the Morse Message, does not technically belong on this list as the Russians directed the message to Venus, and thus the primary mission was not Interstellar. The message targets vary in distance from the very short (the majority of targets are under 100 light years away) to the very far, including the Arecibo Message, which targets the M13 globular cluster 24,000 light years away.
While there have been some dissenting voices who argue that ‘revealing’ our location to enemy or hostile alien civilizations is ill-advised at best, most scientific consensus agrees that due to the physical restrictions on speed and travel (as currently understood) we are in no danger of imminent attack. While the Arecibo Message won’t reach its target for another 25,000 years or so, the first of the other messages should arrive by 2029. Other scientist point out that our current terrestrial radio and television broadcasts represent their own METI signal and thus we have no need to fund additional broad- or narrow-cast messages.
Image of the Arecibo Radio Telescope courtesy Marius Strom under a Creative Commons 3.0 share alike license.
Image of the Arecibo Message of 1679 bits in the public domain.
Cover design for an Italian reprint of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” by Gabriel Björk Stiernström.
The city lights of Pakistan and India by NASA Johnson
Petroglyphs in Maharashtra, India, date back to 10,000 B.C....
Ratnagiri petroglyph, India. 10,000 BC...
Amateur astronomer, owns a telescope. This is a side blog to satiate my science-y cravings! I haven't yet mustered the courage to put up my personal astro-stuff here. Main blog : @an-abyss-called-life
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