Messages from Humans

A good part of my day is spent in the research room here at work. A place where most of the time there isn't much "research" going on. It's a small conference room that houses about 15 or so people from different departements and different countries working on clinical or research fellowships. Anyways for the most part these guys are quite personable but what I noticed was the degree of difficulty in communicating simple daily things such as, "Do you wanna go to lunch?" or asking someone about their weekend. There are so many cultural and language barriers to get by but somehow we manage to communicate.

With such problems in communication by creatures of the same species, what must the difficulty be of talking to a different one... and not one on earth but one thousands of light years away? This is not a new problem. In the mid 1970's a message was sent from Arecibo to a group of stars near our galaxy. Here is the raw form of the message:

0000001010101000000000000101000001010000000100100010001000100
1011001010101010101010100100100000000000000000000000000000000
0000011000000000000000000011010000000000000000000110100000000
0000000000101010000000000000000001111100000000000000000000000
0000000001100001110001100001100010000000000000110010000110100
0110001100001101011111011111011111011111000000000000000000000
0000010000000000000000010000000000000000000000000000100000000
0000000001111110000000000000111110000000000000000000000011000
0110000111000110001000000010000000001000011010000110001110011
0101111101111101111101111100000000000000000000000000100000011
0000000001000000000001100000000000000010000011000000000011111
1000001100000011111000000000011000000000000010000000010000000
0100000100000011000000010000000110000110000001000000000011000
1000011000000000000000110011000000000000011000100001100000000
0110000110000001000000010000001000000001000001000000011000000
0010001000000001100000000100010000000001000000010000010000000
1000000010000000100000000000011000000000110000000011000000000
1000111010110000000000010000000100000000000000100000111110000
0000000010000101110100101101100000010011100100111111101110000
1110000011011100000000010100000111011001000000101000001111110
0100000010100000110000001000001101100000000000000000000000000
0000000001110000010000000000000011101010001010101010100111000
0000001010101000000000000000010100000000000000111110000000000
0000001111111110000000000001110000000111000000000110000000000
0110000000110100000000010110000011001100000001100110000100010
1000001010001000010001001000100100010000000010001010001000000
0000001000010000100000000000010000000001000000000000001001010
00000000001111001111101001111000

The message sent in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope toward the globular cluster M13 consisted of 1679 “bits” ofinformation. A “0” is represented by an “off” radio pulse,while a “1” is represented by an “on” radio pulse.

Assuming the reader of this blog is part of the human species and is considered intelligent... would you be able to decipher this code into something meaningful? Remember this was created not by aliens but by members of your own species! If you have a difficult time, just think how difficult it would be for someone non-human to do...

Click the link if you get frustrated for an explanation...