Angine de Poitrine will likely appear on Later... with Jools Holland on 21st June 2026 from a recording made yesterday (I wasn't there and am jealous of the lucky people who got tickets through BBC Shows & Tours, well in advance - they wouldn't have known who was performing).
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[A] Thanks to the 1997 sci-fi film Contact I first learned that radio waves carrying our planet's earliest radio and television broadcasts might be emanating out into space (footnote 1) so possibly that alerted them to our presence.
[B] Or maybe their planet’s cosmic record players were able to listen to the Golden Records on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes (footnote 2) which were launched in 1977 and are the furthest-travelled-from-Earth things ever - Voyager 1 is over 25 billion miles kilometres (16 miles) from Earth! (3).
"The musical selection is also varied, featuring works by composers such as J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky. The disc also includes music by Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar, Valya Balkanska, Kamil Jalilov, and electronic composer Laurie Spiegel." (see 'Contents' in reference (2).
[C] Carl Sagan wrote the book that Contact was based on and he was project manager for the Voyager probe records. His friend and colleague Frank Drake, of the Drake Equation (4), pinged (with a team, not just him!) a message via a radio signal into space and my money's on this one being the thing that sparked their visit to Earth ;)
The team wanted to demonstrate the impressive signal strength of the then-recently upgraded Arecibo radio Telescope and settled on the idea of sending a message into space that could reach, and be translated by, alien beings that had the technological prowess to have developed radio receivers of their own, and who could understand mathematically-mediated signals - prime numbers.
They beamed an image, known as the Arecibo Message (5), which is made up of 1,679 "bits" of data in a stream of "1"s and "0"s. The actual signal was a high frequency radio wave (as you might expect for a radio telescope!) modulated, so that to transmit a 1 the frequency rose a little and to transmit a 0 the frequency dropped a little. Basically a very high-pitched warble, inaudible to human ears but detectable by radio receivers and clearly containing two different 'sounds' representing 1/0, ON/OFF, HIGH/LOW etc.
1,679 is a semi-prime (a number that can be formed by multiplying two prime numbers: 23 and 73) so that's why it was chosen. If you are a clever alien receiving this string of 1,679 1s and 0s you might try and split them into a grid of 73 x 23, or 23 x 73 - but only one of the grids will look like there’s an image there, see below.
You might colour the 1s in black and leave the 0s white (or colour the 0s black and leave the 1s white - it makes no difference as you just get the 'negative' of the same image and it works fine either way).
Left: Arecibo Message monochrome version by Pablo Carlos Budassi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Right: Arecibo Message colour version by Arne Nordmann under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
For human-readable clarity the image is usually depicted in colour as on the right (the original image-signal didn't have any colour information) and the purple bit at the bottom represents the Arecibo telescope, the bits in yellow above are the planets in our solar system (as of 1974, count 'em... Pluto... (Sun is the square on the left)), little red humanoid - see (5) for more info on the image.
Incidentally during the transmission there were lots of press people attending the event so they patched a human-audible version (6) through speakers and one of the engineers spotted that the first few bleeps and bloops coincidentally spelled out 'Hi' in Morse Code •••• •• (7).
My assumption is that it was a case of “We like your black and white dots and modulated signals and thought you might enjoy some of ours…”
Much higher resolution images have regularly been sent, using sound, from the International Space Station to people on Earth via radio waves - this is Slow Scan TV a version of which was also used during the Moon landings to transmit image data.
🦶🎵🎵…
(1) https://earthsky.org/space/earths-radio-bubble-extent-of-radio-signals/, but “might be emanating” is doing a fair bit of heavy lifting here as signal strength would be feeble and degraded, likely combined chaotically with other signals and also wasn’t really pointed in a particular direction. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/dkb5c/if_aliens_are_monitoring_our_tv_broadcasts_then/
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
(3) https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message - the Arecibo telescope (in Puerto Rico) collapsed in 2020 (it also features in the film Contact). See also 'What we said to aliens' episode of the The Rest Is Science podcast.
(6) https://soundcloud.com/nadiadrake3/arecibo-message-1974
(7) https://archive.ph/hBe7G - the original requires an email address to read https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/40-years-ago-earth-beamed-its-first-postcard-to-the-stars
Edit: I just spotted this after finalising this post!
If an alien landed and asked you "what is music?", what would you play for them? (31 May 2026) The Guardian - this is just the 'provocation' for readers to respond to and at some future point they'll publish the responses.
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