Atlanta Science Festival Exploration Expo and the Arecibo Message

What would you say to aliens?

For the second year in a row, the SETI Institute joined in the Atlanta Science Festival’s Exploration Expo in Piedmont Park. The expo drew over 20,000 science lovers, many of whom visited our booth.

This year’s booth theme, “What Would You Say to Aliens,” focused on the Arecibo Message, sent in 1974 from the Arecibo Telescope to the globular cluster M13. The message encoded information about life on Earth, visualized as a grid of binary data, shown here with colors to separate the different areas.

Building on the theme, visitors of all ages used graph paper and colored pencils to create their own messages to aliens. At the same time, SETI Institute booth hosts, Dr. Lauren Sgro and Beth Johnson, explained the contents of the original Arecibo Message and how and where it was sent.

Science in Action at the Expo

In addition to the main activity, volunteers from the University of Georgia’s Physics and Astronomy Department shared observations of the Sun using a Unistellar telescope equipped with a solar filter. Throughout the day, they highlighted several sunspots and explained the science behind them. Additional volunteers (including Lauren’s mom and Beth’s niece) helped distribute materials and display participants’ images around the booth.