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| This first page of the Cosmic Call 1999 message, shown above, involves only numbers |
Cosmic Call
Physicists are announcing today that they have designed a message to
be broadcast in the direction of nearby stars in order to search for
extra-terrestrial intelligence. This project is being presented by Dr.
Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas from the Defence Research Establishment
Valcartier, near Quebec City (Canada), to the American Astronomical
Society meeting in Austin, TX. This is the first time in a quarter
of a century that such a cosmic call will be attempted. The complete message is about 400,000 bits long and will be transmitted
three times over a 3-hour period in the direction of the four selected stars.
Then, it will be followed by a series of greetings from people around
the world. The transmission will start on March 15 1999.
Finding a transmitter for this task was not easy; the project will use a 70
m (230 ft) Ukrainian antenna equipped with a 150 kW transmitter
broadcasting at 5 GHz (6 cm). Using this antenna, any civilization within
100 light-years
which has access to a radio-telescope with an area of one squared-kilometer
will be able to read the message. The artificial nature of the message
should be able to be detected by similar instruments at distances up to
10,000 light-years. The Cosmic Call messages consisted of a few digital sections - "Rosetta Stone", copy of Arecibo Message, Bilingual Image Glossary, the Braastad message, as well as text, audio, video and other image files submitted for transmission by everyday people around the world.
Wikipedia
Rosetta Stone
The Interstellar Rosetta Stone (ISR) is a message created by Canadian scientists Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumás, authors of a similar Scientific Message in Cosmic Call 1999. The size of the ISR is 263906 bits with 127 symbols in each of 2078 lines. Unlike their message of 1999 which consisted of 23 ‘pages’ where each page was 127 X 127 binary elements, the ISR uses a slightly different approach: Different ‘pages’ have different numbers of ‘lines’. The contents of the ISR, representing an attempt to create an elementary encyclopedia of terrestrial knowledge, was not significantly changed from the Dutil-Dumás message of Cosmic Call 1999.
The Braastad message
The Braastad and TE Staff messages were prepared by Team Encounter, www.teamencounter.com. The Braastad Message uses the ‘mathematical language’ of the ISR to describe Team Encounter’s premiere spacecraft, Humanity’s First Starship, including its dimensions, payload, trajectory, and projected time of launch. The TE Staff messages include various messages submitted by Team Encounter personnel. The Braastad Message represents 88687 bits, and the Team Encounter Staff Message represents 24899 bits, for a total of 113586 bits.
The Arecibo Message
see Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence #5
The Bilingual Image Glossary
The Bilingual Image Glossary (BIG) message is synthesized by us on the basis of 12 binary images where each image is 101 elements by 101 lines. The BIG served as the Image Dictionary of the Teen Age Message of 2001, [4]. Updating of the Dictionary consisted in its transformation from 12 separate pages into one page. Thus, each of the separate pages (except the last) was shortened by one line to exclude doubling the width of the horizontal frame lines. As a result, the uniform BIG page contains (12 * 100 + 1) = 1201 lines, and the size of its binary file equals the product of two prime numbers — 101 and 1201, which makes 121301 bits. The BIG message image is given from the left.
... personal messages from thousands of people in over 50 countries were included in Cosmic Call 2003. These messages were submitted, primarily through e-mail, to Team Encounter’s offices in Houston, Texas where the messages were prepared for transmission. The personal messages included text, still image, audio and video files. Any analog messages submitted by Team Encounter members were transformed by Team Encounter into digital format. All told, the personal messages were organized into 24 electronic folders and, in total, represented 220 megabytes of information. It was clear that for their radiation into space the transmission rate of 400 bauds would not be sufficient — bit-by-bit transmission of such a large amount of information would take more than 50 days of transmission time. Therefore, we transmitted the personal messages at a rate of 100 kbauds. As a result, we spent a total of approximately 11 hours transmitting the Personal Messages in Cosmic Call 2003
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