Intelligent life. It's a scarcity on our own planet, so we look beyond our atmosphere, hoping to find something, somewhere out there in the vastness of space that has more than two or three brain cells to rub together.
Have you ever seen the kinds of things we've sent into space for others to find and make sense of? I've often myself wondered what our own scientists, hackers, and problem-solvers would make of these messages.
In 1972 and 1973, Pioneer 10 and 11 were respectively sent off into space. Both were labeled with a gold-plated aluminum-alloy plaque engraved with information about humans, Earth and our solar system. Warning: If you zoom in on the image, it includes drawn nude human anatomy.
On November 16, 1974, Scientists at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico blasted 1,679 bits (not bytes!) into the sky at 1 bit per second, aiming their transmitter at Globular Cluster M13, some 25,000 light years away. How much information can be contained in 1,679 bits? What would you do with it? Would you even know where to begin? It's not divisible by 8, so it isn't using "bytes" in the traditional way you would expect. Remember, this is 1974 and the message is intended to be received and decoded by intelligent life.
The answer is interesting, and the binary stream above was crafted by some of 1974's most brilliant minds.0000001010101000000000000101000001010000000100100010001000100101100101010
1010101010100100100000000000000000000000000000000000001100000000000000000
0011010000000000000000000110100000000000000000010101000000000000000000111
1100000000000000000000000000000000110000111000110000110001000000000000011
0010000110100011000110000110101111101111101111101111100000000000000000000
0000001000000000000000001000000000000000000000000000010000000000000000011
1111000000000000011111000000000000000000000001100001100001110001100010000
0001000000000100001101000011000111001101011111011111011111011111000000000
0000000000000000010000001100000000010000000000011000000000000000100000110
0000000001111110000011000000111110000000000110000000000000100000000100000
0001000001000000110000000100000001100001100000010000000000110001000011000
0000000000001100110000000000000110001000011000000000110000110000001000000
0100000010000000010000010000000110000000010001000000001100000000100010000
0000010000000100000100000001000000010000000100000000000011000000000110000
0000110000000001000111010110000000000010000000100000000000000100000111110
0000000000010000101110100101101100000010011100100111111101110000111000001
1011100000000010100000111011001000000101000001111110010000001010000011000
0001000001101100000000000000000000000000000000000111000001000000000000001
1101010001010101010100111000000000101010100000000000000001010000000000000
0111110000000000000000111111111000000000000111000000011100000000011000000
0000011000000011010000000001011000001100110000000110011000010001010000010
1000100001000100100010010001000000001000101000100000000000010000100001000
0000000001000000000100000000000000100101000000000001111001111101001111000
In 1977, two identical Voyager Golden Records were sent into space aboard Voyager 1 and 2. The record itself contained several recordings including an audio representation of captured brain waves. It was pressed in copper and plated with gold, but was technologically identical to vinyl phonograph records of the era, and I believe it would likely play on any regular phonograph. The record itself was contained in a cover (shown below, click to zoom) that contained similar information to the Pioneer Plaque.
Would an alien civilization understand what to do with any of these? What would Earth's own hackers and scientists do with information like this if we found it? Things like this fascinate me, and the 1970s were certainly an exciting time for technology and communications, which includes the space program.
The Apollo 13 mission itself (April 11-17, 1970) is proof of the kinds of things that hackers can do. While the mission was a failure, geniuses hard at work within NASA were busy finding ways to force equipment to do things that simply "couldn't be done" in order to bring the crew home safely. I don't know if it was actually spoken in real life, but in the movie Apollo 13, Flight Director Krantz tells off an engineer who is concerned about equipment being used unconventionally: "I don't care about what anything was DESIGNED to do, I care about what it CAN do." If that's not the hacker spirit, I don't know what is!
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