For as long as humans have contemplated the universe, they have wondered if our planet is the only on out there that is inhabited. I’m not sure what I think on that line, but I expect that if there are other inhabited planets, it is likely that they are not the same as this one. Of course, people are free to disagree with me and they have a right to believe what they want to. Nevertheless, scientists have been trying to prove that there is other life out there for quite some time now.
The only real way to prove it, would be to “test the waters” so to speak, so on November 16, 1974, a full eight years before the movie E.T. came out, in which E.T. was told to “Phone Home” on the big screen, researchers sent humanity’s first real-life, deliberate radio message into outer space to extraterrestrials. The message went out from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, where the Arecibo radio telescope was getting a major upgrade and conducting a ceremony to mark the upgrades.
The message received no response, and maybe none was really expected, but the researchers, wanted to showcase humanity’s technical advancement, even though they weren’t expecting an answer. “It was strictly a symbolic event, to show that we could do it,” Donald Campbell, professor of astronomy at Cornell University, told the Cornell Chronicle in 1999. He had been a research associate for the Arecibo Observatory at the time. Maybe they didn’t expect an answer, but I’m sure if they had received something, they would have patted themselves on the back with the statement, “We knew it!!” tacked on for good measure.
The transmission was a simple, visual message, created by astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, was aimed at possible intelligent life in the globular star cluster called M13, located at the edge of the Milky Way, some 21,000 light years from Earth. The message included the formula for DNA, a crude diagram of the solar system, a drawing of the Arecibo telescope and a stick figure of a human. The message sent strikes me as odd, given the fact that we would have had no idea what a species of life from another planet could understand, but I guess they had to start somewhere, and so the used the resources they had.
No return transmissions came to the Arecibo telescope, nevertheless, it shaped cosmic research for six decades. The telescope collapsed in 2020 after two cable failures. Two years later, the National Science Foundation announced it would decommission and dismantle it, replacing it with an education center. At the 2021 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, presenters wrote that Arecibo “left an indelible mark on planetary science, radio astronomy and space and atmospheric sciences.”
The only “possible” transmission ever received from outer space was dubbed “The Wow!” signal. On August 15, 1977, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope picked up a strong narrowband radio signal while scanning for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal seemed to come from the constellation Sagittarius and had traits expected of an extraterrestrial source. A few days later, astronomer Jerry R Ehman noticed the anomaly while reviewing the data, circling the intensity reading “6EQUJ5” and jotting “Wow!” beside it, giving the event its famous name. The signal lasted the entire 72-second observation window, but despite many follow-up 
searches and theories, ranging from space debris reflections to comet hydrogen clouds, it was never detected again, and no definitive explanation has been found. While some people believe it may have been an alien transmission, its one-time occurrence makes that idea hard to prove. “The Wow!” signal remains a source of curiosity, inspiring targeted searches and scientific debate.
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