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Years ago adventurers placed carefully worded notes in bottles, tossed the bottle in the ocean and wondered if their message would be discovered and read by anyone on a distant shore. They might never know!
What if that message were sent electronically across millions of miles, over thousands of years, into outer space? Modern scientists are wondering the same thing as their earlier hopeful correspondents. Will this modern message reach a living creature somewhere out there?
For the past 45 years a message from Earth’s scientists has been traveling to a distant cluster of stars carry coded information describing Earth, its inhabitants and other basic information in a manner scientists believe can be interpreted.The hope is that someday—in a galaxy far away—the message will be received, perceived, and initiate a response back to Earth. It may not be in our lifetime, but if it happens, future generations will know that intelligent life on earth is not the only intelligent life in the universe!
In this issue young astronomers will:
- Read expository text about intergalactic communication
- Understand information included in an Aericebo message
- Create an alien from items found in the news
- Write a friendly message to an alien
- Decode a message using a decoder ring
- Find identical aliens by closely examining similarities and differences
- Use the newspaper to hunt for logos and decipher meaning
6 page PDF
