11/3/2022 0 Comments Jungle heat observatory![]() ![]() In its intended goal of communicating with life-forms outside our planet, the Arecibo message has surprisingly sparse company. #JUNGLE HEAT OBSERVATORY SERIES#But if you were somehow able to turn on a ham radio receiver and tune it to 2,380 MHz, you might catch the message in flight: a long series of rhythmic pulses, 1,679 of them to be exact, with a clear, repetitive structure that would make them immediately detectable as a product of intelligent life. Though you would have traveled far outside our solar system, you would only be a tiny fraction of the way to M13. Imagine hurtling 250 trillion miles toward those stars. If you find yourself in the Northern Hemisphere this summer on a clear night, locate the Hercules constellation in the sky, 21 stars that form the image of a man, arms outstretched, perhaps kneeling. Today, more than four decades later, we still do not know if Ryle’s fears were warranted, because the Arecibo message is still eons away from its intended recipient, a cluster of roughly 300,000 stars known as M13. It was irresponsible, Ryle fumed, to tinker with interstellar outreach when such gestures, however noble their intentions, might lead to the destruction of all life on earth. ![]() Arguing that ‘‘any creatures out there malevolent or hungry,’’ Ryle demanded that the International Astronomical Union denounce Drake’s message and explicitly forbid any further communications. By alerting the cosmos of our existence, Ryle wrote, we were risking catastrophe. But within days, the Royal Astronomer of England, Martin Ryle, released a thunderous condemnation of Drake’s stunt. It seemed to most of the onlookers to be a hopeful act, if a largely symbolic one: a message in a bottle tossed into the sea of deep space. But its true medium was the silent, invisible pulse of radio waves, traveling at the speed of light. The engineers had translated the missive into sound, so that the assembled group would have something to experience during the transmission. The broadcast marked the first time a human being had intentionally transmitted a message targeting another solar system. That 168 seconds of noise, now known as the Arecibo message, was the brainchild of the astronomer Frank Drake, then the director of the organization that oversaw the Arecibo facility. To the listeners, the pattern was indecipherable, but somehow the experience of hearing those two notes oscillating in the air moved many in the crowd to tears. After a series of speeches, the assembled crowd sat in silence at the edge of the telescope while the public-address system blasted nearly three minutes of two-tone noise through the muggy afternoon heat. To celebrate the reopening, the astronomers who maintained the observatory decided to take the most sensitive device yet constructed for listening to the cosmos and transform it, briefly, into a machine for talking back. The mammoth structure - an immense concrete-and-aluminum saucer as wide as the Eiffel Tower is tall, planted implausibly inside a limestone sinkhole in the middle of a mountainous jungle - had been upgraded to ensure its ability to survive the volatile hurricane season and to increase its precision tenfold. The occasion was a rechristening of the Arecibo Observatory, at the time the largest radio telescope in the world. 16, 1974, a few hundred astronomers, government officials and other dignitaries gathered in the tropical forests of Puerto Rico’s northwest interior, a four-hour drive from San Juan. ![]()
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