The Arecibo Message of 1974: How a Binary Hello Reframed Our Search for Life Beyond Earth

To the point

Frank Drake and Carl Sagan supervised a 1974 Arecibo message sent in binary to Messier 13 to show that contact with other civilizations could be attempted, including numbers, formulas, DNA, a human, our solar system, and the telescope, while they urged listening for replies and even proposed a Cyclops-like network to search for signals, a quest that helped launch SETI, spurred exoplanet discoveries, and shifted thinking toward studying life beyond Earth as testable science, even though the final answer remains unknown and the message is still traveling for tens of thousands of years.