The Last Arecibo Message: Reimagining a 1974 Binary Portrait for a Modern Interstellar Telegram

To the point

Fifty years after sending a message from Arecibo, this account follows the 1974 binary portrait by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan that encoded 1,679 bits about numbers, DNA, a human, and our solar system, notes the observatory’s 2020 collapse mourned by Abel Méndez, and describes a 2018 update from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez to Teegarden’s Star adding Meraki, a musical piece by Ángel Vázquez, and a cosmological map that drops Pluto, calling it the Last Arecibo Message with no broadcast plan yet as Gaia DR3 at about 395 light-years would be the first to receive it in roughly 345 years, while the broader debate on signaling civilizations continues amid expanding exoplanet discoveries and renewed curiosity about whether we are alone.