Just be.

The Arecibo Message

The Arecibo message is a radio message that was beamed into space at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope on 16 November 1974. It was aimed at the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away because it was a large and close collection of stars that was available in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony.

This was a very powerful emission, equivalent to a 20 trillion watt omni directional broadcast using Arecibo’s megawatt transmitter attached to its 305 meter antenna, concentrating the beam in a very narrow funnel of the sky. The emission, that could be detectable just about anywhere in the galaxy within that funnel, would have been detectable by a receiver similar in size to Arecibo’s. This transmission was the strongest man-made signal ever sent.

Note the portion that represents humanity:

The element in the center represents a human.
The element on the left (in the image) indicates
the average height of a person: 1764 mm.
The element on the right depicts the size of the
Human population in 1974, around 4.2 billion.
Courtesy: Answers.com Technology

The Arecibo Response

On the 19th of August 2001 a message appeared overnight in a field next to Chilbolton radio telescope, home of SETI, in Hampshire, UK.

close up, flipped

The ‘crop circle’ message appeared within a secure area surrounding the Radio Telescop facility in the middle of the night. It is geometrically flawless.

It was 75 feet wide and 120 feet long.

Now let’s take a look at this ‘reply’ which had taken 27 years from the time it was transmitted.
This is shown as an animated image of the first transmission, slowly transposed with the ‘ET’ response.

For one, the humanoid has a far larger head. There is now an extra strand on the right side of the DNA double-helix and another, less obvious, change is in the binary coding of the number of nucleotides in DNA itself (in the center).

The human genome has 4,293,917,614, or nearly 4.3 billion nucleotide sequences, while the mystery genome sequence has 4,294,966,190, or 1,048,576 (one million) more nucleotide sequences than human DNA.

Is this really a reply from our galactic neighbours?

The reply was an altered mimic of our initial message, this suggests to me not only intelligence, but intelligence enough to understand our message and respond in kind.

But why not just fly down and say hi.