Google on Friday celebrated humankind's first attempt 44 years ago to communicate with intelligent life beyond our own planet with an animated doodle.


In 1974, a group of scientists gathered at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to send the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space, called the Arecibo Message.


Their three-minute radio message was aimed at a cluster of stars in the constellation Hercules, 25,000 light years away from Earth, Google said in a statement.


This historic transmission was intended to demonstrate the capabilities of Arecibo's recently upgraded radio telescope, whose 1000-foot-diameter dish made it the largest and most powerful in the world at the time, it said. "It was strictly a symbolic event, to show that we could do it," said Donald Campbell, a Cornell University professor of astronomy, who was a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory at the time.

The message itself was devised by a team of researchers from Cornell University led by Frank Drake. "What could we do that would be spectacular? We could send a message!" Drake said.


Written with the assistance of Carl Sagan (remember the spectacular TV series, Cosmos), the message itself could be arranged to form a pictograph representing some fundamental facts of mathematics, human DNA, planet Earth's place in the solar system, and a picture of a human-like figure and an image of the telescope itself.


Since the Arecibo Message will take roughly 25,000 years to reach its intended destination -- a group of 300,000 stars known as M13 -- humankind will have to wait a long time for an answer, Google said.


In the 44 years since it was first transmitted, the message has travelled only 259 trillion miles, only a tiny fraction of the distance to its final destination, it said. -- PTI