Google Doodle Celebrates 44th Year Of Humankind's First Attempt To Communicate With Aliens

Google on Friday, November 16, celebrated humankind's first attempt to communicate with interstellar species. The tech giant company remembered the attempt made by the humankind 44 years ago with an animated doodle. 

Check out the doodle here. 

A group of scientists in 1974, gathered at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to send the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space, called Arecibo Message in order to connect with the intelligent life beyond Earth. It was a three-minute radio message was aimed at a cluster of stars in the constellation 'Hercules' which is 25,000 light years away from Earth, Google said in a statement.

READ: How To Watch The New Narcos Mexico Series For Free On Netflix

This historic transmission was intended to demonstrate the capabilities of Arecibo's recently upgraded radio telescope, whose 1000-foot-diameter dish made it the largest and most powerful in the world at the time, the statement said.

"It was strictly a symbolic event, to show that we could do it," said Donald Campbell, a Cornell University professor of astronomy, who was a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory at the time.

The creator of the doodle,  Gerben Steenks, in a statement said, "The subject of today's doodle lends itself to so many possibilities. Earlier concepts experimented with depicting the recipients of the Arecibo Message and their reactions," 

READ: Facebook Just Fixed A Bug That Allowed A Third-party Website To Access Users' Data

The message itself was devised by a team of researchers from Cornell University led by Frank Drake.

"What could we do that would be spectacular? We could send a message!" Drake said.

As per media reports, the message itself could be arranged to form a pictograph representing some fundamental facts of mathematics, human DNA, planet Earth's location in the solar system, a picture of a human-like figure and an image of the telescope itself.

Google in its statement revealed that the Arecibo Message will take roughly around 25,000 years to reach its destination, which is a group of 300,000 stars known as M13, and humankind will have to wait longer for a reply. The statement further revealed that, as of now, the message has travelled 259 trillion miles, which is only a tiny fraction of the distance it needs to cover in order to reach its final destination.

(With inputs from PTI)