Verified answer

It's still out there. It will take approximately 25,000 years for it to arrive at the destination that they were aiming for. If "they" are going to hear it, then they'd better have their ears (or, whatever they use) to their radios, because the entire broadcast was less than three minutes long.

Assuming that "they" actually do receive the entire message, and assuming that they record it, then they'll have the rest of eternity to figure out what it means. That might not be enough time.

Maybe they will figure out that it's a string of 1679 bits. Maybe one of them will notice that 1679 has exactly two prime factors. Maybe they, like us, are accustomed to recording their ideas on two-dimensional pieces of paper, and maybe they will try to see what it looks like if they plot the bits in a 73x23 grid.

There's a lot of different ways you could fill a 73x23 grid with 1679 bits. Maybe it will occur to them to fill the grid row-by-row or column by column. Maybe the "obvious" way (according to their culture) will be something different (maybe a spiral.) Some of the pictures that they get may look "random", and some of them might look like "something." Again, much will depend on their culture.

Maybe they will eventually decide that our interpretation is the most likely. Maybe their "experts" will be divided over which pattern is the right pattern. Probably their biggest clue will be the crude diagram of a parabolic dish antenna that appears in the image. Maybe they will recognize that, or maybe it will have been so many aeons since they used that particular technology that nobody even remembers what they looked like.

If they ever pick the right way to fill the bits into the array, then they will have to figure out what all of the different crude blobby forms mean. That's the part that could take forever.

Assuming they even have their radios on, and their recorders running when the message flashes past.

Yes, the message is in fact a simple picture. The picture shows the DNA molecule, basic information about the Earth as of 1974, etc.

Basically, the hope is that the extraterrestrials will notice something about the number of bits in the message; 551 bits. This has no factors except 19 and 29, and this hints that maybe the message is meant to be a 19 by 29 grid.

Now, writing the message as a 19 by 29 grid produces nonsense. However, when you write the message as a 29 by 19 grid, you get what appears to be a non random image of a DNA spiral, a humanoid figure, a number system, the Solar System etc.

Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a gold-anodized plaque, attached to the space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972.

The Pioneer plaques are a pair of gold anodized aluminum plaques which were placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft, featuring a pictorial message, in case either Pioneer 10 or 11 are intercepted by extraterrestrial beings.

The plaques show the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.

If we received a short little message from space, you can bet that thousand of people would pounce on the message to decipher it. Millions of man-hours would go into interpreting it. Maybe it would be easy to understand and it gets resolved in weeks. Maybe it takes years, decades. Everyone from respected scientists to kooks would come up with their own interpretation, you can be sure.

You can assume this same procedure would take place with any civilization that was to capture our message. It would be well-scrutinized.

I,m thinking Carl my have been to smart even for aliens ,..personally i would have engraved a man , women and child ,..possibly our planetary system ,..a few animals and sent that off into space on the side of a drifting rocket .

Wasn't that message beamed at the one place in the galaxy where we can be pretty darned confident that no Earth-like planets could ever form? A Globular Cluster?

i think of it may actually be Piece Of Me via Britney Spears hehe Umm in all probability area Lord via Powertrip and NIN closer .... Sounds approximately top oh we could continuously upload some purple Floyd money and gadget with Aenema on an identical time as we are at exhibiting what we are fairly like