9/5/2023 0 Comments Arecibo telescope movieNarrated from the perspective of an endangered Puerto Rican parrot dwelling in the rainforests near Arecibo, the experimental work weaves the mythos of the Hindu ‘Om’, the science of the Fermi paradox and the story of a domesticated parrot named Alex, famed for learning some 150 human words, into its expansive narrative. The Great Silence (2014) interrogates our drive to find other intelligent minds in the distant static of space while millions of complex lifeforms right here on Earth face existential threats of humanity’s making. Save for the telescope’s starring roles in the films GoldenEye (1995) and Contact (1997), it is perhaps best known in popular culture for its ‘Arecibo Message’ – a powerful transmission aimed at a star cluster 25,000 light-years away, intended to signal our presence to any interstellar neighbours who might be able to receive and decode it. The sprawling 305-metre radio telescope would eventually become one of the most powerful astronomical tools of the 20th century, making groundbreaking observations of near and deep space, before its partial collapse in 2020 lead to it being decommissioned by the US National Science Foundation. Built into a massive sinkhole in northern Puerto Rico and completed in 1963, the Arecibo Telescope was first conceived as a tool to study Earth’s upper atmosphere, and funded by the US government in hopes that it might also track nuclear missiles.
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