Are we alone? The Arecibo Message

Well, I recently discovered an interesting event. In 1974 the Arecibo radio telescope was used to send a message an interstellar message. After a number of modifications had been carried out to the transmitter, enabling it to broadcast signals at a power of up to 20 terawatts (1 terawatt = 1 trillion watts) and as an inaugural test of these improvements it was decided by SETI to transmit an encoded message to the heavens. This signal was aimed towards the globular star cluster M13, some 25,000 light years away and consisting of some 300,000 stars in the constellation of Hercules.

The message was actually transmitted on November 16th 1974 and consisted of 1679 pulses of binary code (0's and 1's) - which took a little under three minutes to transmit. It was transmitted on a frequency of 2380MHz.

And it seems on in August 2001 we might have received a reply in the form of crop circles in Chilbolton, England. The crop circles depicts a slightly altered information sequence in comparison with the orignal message sent.


You can find more information about the original and "received message" here , here and here.

As far as I can gather these crop circles haven't been proved or disproved as a hoax. This provides for some interesting questions. Could this actually be a reply from an ET? Maybe... maybe not...

The question if we are alone to me is a no brainer. Personally I don't believe that we are. There's just too much possibility of live out there. The real question is if/when we will make contact. Perhaps it's already happened and we just don't know it!