Google decorates its homepage with a doodle to mark special event

The doodle marked a major event in 1974 when scientists had sent humankind's first interstellar radio message - the Arecibo Message.

The message was three-minute long.

" Forty-four years ago today, a group of scientists gathered at the Arecibo Observatory amidst the tropical forests of Puerto Rico to attempt humankind’s first communication with intelligent life beyond our own planet. Their three-minute radio message—a series of exactly 1,679 binary digits (a multiple of two prime numbers) which could be arranged in a grid 73 rows by 23 columns—was aimed at a cluster of stars 25,000 light years away from earth," read the Google doodle page.

"This historic transmission was intended to demonstrate the capabilities of Arecibo’s recently upgraded radio telescope, whose 1000-foot-diameter dish made it the largest and most powerful in the world at the time," the doodle said.

The message itself was devised by a team of researchers from Cornell University led by Dr. Frank Drake—the astronomer and astrophysicist responsible for the Drake Equation, a means of estimating the number of planets hosting extraterrestrial life within the Milky Way galaxy.

Written with the assistance of Carl Sagan, the message itself could be arranged in a rectangular grid of 0s and 1s to form a pictograph representing some fundamental facts of mathematics, human DNA, planet earth’s place in the solar system, and a picture of a human-like figure as well as an image of the telescope itself.