The first intentional message to other civilizations was beamed into the galaxy 50 years ago tomorrow. There wasn’t much to it – just 1,679 bits of data. When properly decoded, the message yields a picture – stick-figure outlines of a person and the message’s planet of origin, for example. The image also features the facility that beamed it into space: the giant Arecibo radio telescope, which collapsed a few years ago.

The Arecibo message was conceived by Frank Drake. He was a pioneer in SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He’d conducted the first search for radio signals just 15 years earlier. One of his collaborators was celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan.

The message was intended primarily as a publicity stunt. Arecibo had just received a major upgrade, and astronomers wanted to show it off. So the message was transmitted just once – it wasn’t repeated.

Other messages have followed, from radio telescopes around the world. Today, though, scientists and others are debating the wisdom of alerting the rest of the galaxy to our presence. They wonder whether messages to the stars might bring an unpleasant response.

The target for the Arecibo message was M13, a giant star cluster in Hercules. It’s in the west-northwest at nightfall, and it’s an easy target for binoculars or a small telescope. But it’s so far away that the message won’t get there for another 25,000 years.

Script by Damond Benningfield