How to say HELLO to an extraterrestrial

NOTE: The Deadline TO SEND YOUR MESSAGE is:
5pm Monday 24 August 2009 Sydney time .

Register here to send your message.




August 14, 9:59 AM Denver Phenomenon Research Examiner Larry Rimbert

After writing article after article, day after day, night and night, week after week, something comes along that is fun and exciting! Here is that something! Maybe you can be part of history and have fun at the same time!. Three organizations, Australia's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, the CSIRO and NASA, have combined efforts to collect and send text messages from the "Hello from Earth" website to transmit to the closest Earth-like planet , that may well contain life, outside of our solar system,

The planet: : Gliese 581d.

Now honestly, how many of you have heard of Gliese 581d? Here are some interesting facts about Gliese 581d and why it is the "chosen" planet!

1. It is a super-Earth - about eight times heavier than Earth.
2. It has three known sister planets which orbit the low-mass red dwarf star Gliese 581 (no "d" here).
3. It is about 20.3 light-years (194 trillion km) away from us, in the constellation Libra.

The habitable zone is indicated as the blue area,
showing that Gliese 581d is located inside the habitable
zone around its low-mass red dwarf star. ESO/Franck Selsis
, University of Bordeaux Courtesy of Hello from Earth

4. It was discovered by Stephane Udry and his team in April 2007 in Switzerland and is considered the "first serious waterworld candidate",
5. According to the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, in April 2009, Gliese 581d orbits its sun every 66.8 days . This is about one fifth of the distance from the Earth to the Sun which is within the star's habitable zone. (see photo to right)
6. Gliese 581d obits its sun which is one third the size of our Sun and 50 times fainter. It is suggested that from the surface of the planet, its sun would be a dull, red glow in the sky.

Now you have to think to yourself : "Self, how would anything so far away be discovered?" The answer: using something called, High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph, (try saying that three times rapidly) which is part of the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile. This instrument is so sensitive it picks up minuscule wobbles of starlight caused by the gravitational pull of planets.

So now we know there may be some kind of life out there. What kind of message can you send? Post your message to the "Hello from Earth" website, but remember all comments are moderated, i.e., screened. Any inappropriate messages will de rejected. For proper evaluation, messages must be in English.

Article continues here.

The Arecibo Reply- UPDATE

UPDATE: I am posting also a video to illustrate the IMPRESSIVE message that was sent back to us.

Just thought it would be interesting to build a correlation between these messages and what has been going on lately....

The Arecibo reply was the name given to a crop circle that appeared in farmland next to the Chilbolton radio telescope; home to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) in Hampshire, UK, on Tuesday 21 August 2001. The design is so named because it appears to be a response to the Arecibo message, which SETI transmitted into space in 1974.
The crop circle design features two images.

The first, estimated to be about 100 by 150 feet based on comparison with the 25-meter Chilbolton dish, is a pixelated halftone representation of a humanoid face.

The second image, estimated to be about 80 by 220 feet, resembles the original Arecibo message though changed in a number of key elements, said by Ufologists to be a reply sent to Earth by an alien species.[1]
As with all crop circles, the origin of the Arecibo reply is highly debated. It should be noted that the 27 years between the time the original Arecibo message was sent and the reply in 2001, there would not nearly have been sufficient time for the message to arrive at its intended destination; furthermore, by the time it does, the M13 cluster will no longer be there.

The original Arecibo message was transmitted as a three trillion watt (omnidirectional equivalent, 1MW actual) broadcast from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The message was sent in a very narrow beam towards a globular cluster known as M13, 25,100 light years away. It was a pictogram arranged in a matrix of 23 pixels by 73 pixels. It was intended to describe our numbering system, the building blocks and formulas for DNA, the double helix of DNA, the shape and size of a human being, the layout of our solar system, and the radio telescope that sent the message.
The crop formation looked very similar to the Arecibo message but with several variations. Below the dot pattern for our numbering system, the crop formation had an additional pattern that indicated the atomic number of silicon in addition to the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus numbers. Instead of a double helix symbol of DNA, the crop formation depicted three sets of diagonal lines.
Instead of a depiction of a human being, as presented in the Arecibo message, the crop pattern had a different depiction of a humanoid form. This new image showed a body with two arms and legs like humans, but the head was much larger. The height of the crop formation’s body was indicated as being slightly taller than half the height of a human. The dot pattern in the crop formation indicated a population that was almost six and a half billion larger than our own.
The Arecibo message depicted the 9 planets around the Sun with the symbol for Earth raised above the rest to indicate where humanity lives. Earth’s dot was also located directly below the depiction of man. In the crop formation, there were three symbols that were raised above the rest, possibly indicating three populated planets in that solar system.
At the very bottom of both formations, there are distinctly different dot patterns. The Arecibo message had a depiction of the telescope that sent the message with an indicated size of 2,430 times the wavelength of the message (at 126 mm, so 306 feet) . The crop formation had a depiction of something else with a size of 6,748 times its wavelength (which is obviously unknown). This shape was depicted even more clearly in a 2000 Chilbolton crop circle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_reply