If You Think The Ocean Now Is A Scary Fuck Then You Haven’t Seen The Scary Fuck That Is The Prehistoric

From the invention of wireless to Radio Broadcast to Space

The word radio was coined in 1907 after a decade of furious activity to discover the mechanism for wireless transmission.  A decade earlier, French physicist Édouard Branly coined the term radioconductor to describe a means of wireless transmission.  He based his term on the verb radiate which ultimately came from the Latin word radius meaning the spoke of a wheel, a ray or beam of light.  The word radio was first used by itself in a 1907 article by Lee De Forest. It was used five years later by the Navy to distinguish it from other wireless technologies and entered common usage in the next decade.  Radio technology advanced so quickly that a little over 50 years later on November 16, 1974, scientists broadcast the first interstellar radio message out to the stars, a program that later became known as METI, the Message to Extra-terrestrial Intelligence. To date, only 9 messages have been transmitted by a variety of organizations:

{The Morse Message (1962)}

Arecibo message (1974)

Cosmic Call 1 (1999)

Teen Age Message (2001)

Cosmic Call 2 (2003)

Across the Universe (2008)

A Message From Earth (2008)

Hello From Earth (2009)

RuBisCo Stars (2009)

Wow! Reply (2012) 

The first radio message, known as the Morse Message, does not technically belong on this list as the Russians directed the message to Venus, and thus the primary mission was not Interstellar.  The message targets vary in distance from the very short (the majority of targets are under 100 light years away) to the very far, including the Arecibo Message, which targets the M13 globular cluster 24,000 light years away.  

While there have been some dissenting voices who argue that ‘revealing’ our location to enemy or hostile alien civilizations is ill-advised at best, most scientific consensus agrees that due to the physical restrictions on speed and travel (as currently understood) we are in no danger of imminent attack.  While the Arecibo Message won’t reach its target for another 25,000 years or so, the first of the other messages should arrive by 2029.  Other scientist point out that our current terrestrial radio and television broadcasts represent their own METI signal and thus we have no need to fund additional broad- or narrow-cast messages.  

Image of the Arecibo Radio Telescope courtesy Marius Strom under a Creative Commons 3.0 share alike license.  

Image of the Arecibo Message of 1679 bits in the public domain.  

Sea of Stars, Vaadhoo Island, Maldives by Doug Perrine

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the red eyeshine of the alligator occurs when light enters its eyes, passes through the rods (light receptors) and cones (color receptors) of the retina, strikes a membrane behind the retina called a tapeatum, and is then reflected back through the eye to the light source. most of the animals with eyeshine are, like alligators, night hunters who must make use of limited light. photos by larry lynch and david moynahan

Steve Gildea Planetary Suite, circa 1990

The Sun from the Internation Space Station

Important science info guys.

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