A Message to Altair

We've sent three messages to space that everyone knows about.

1. The Pioneer plaques
2. The Arecibo message.
3. The Voyager Golden Records.

Gold-plated diagrams bolted to spacecraft, showing our location, our bodies, our solar system.

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1,679 binary digits beamed toward a star cluster 25,000 light years away.

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Humanity's greatest hits, encoded in grooves of gold.

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Everyone knows these. They're taught in schools. Referenced in movies. Symbols of our desire to be known. But in 1983, Japan sent a fourth message. And almost nobody remembers.

It starts the way these things always start. With optimism. With wonder.
E.T. premieres in Japanese theaters in late 1982. The whole country falls in love with the idea of friendly aliens.
The UN declares 1983 the World Communications Year.

Shueisha the publishing giant behind Weekly Shōnen Jump wants to commemorate their 15th anniversary with something bigger than just another manga special. They decide to send a message to space. Two radio astronomers get the call. Masaki Morimoto and Hisashi Hirabayashi. They're told to create something meaningful. Something that represents humanity. Something worthy of traveling between stars. They hole up in Morimoto's Tokyo house for three days.
Eating sushi. Drinking sake. Working like kindergartners. They create 13 images. 71×71 pixels each. bitmap diagrams showing our solar system, DNA, a human figure, basic mathematics. On the final image, above the chemical formula for ethanol, they write one word: "TOAST" (乾盃).

When asked why, Hirabayashi admits they were drinking and toasting a lot while working. These are the people we trusted with our message to the cosmos. And somehow, that makes it perfect.

While the scientists worked, Shueisha opened submissions to their readers. Kids who grew up on Dragon Ball and Fist of the North Star. Kids who watched E.T. and believed in the possibility of contact. Kids who thought maybe, just maybe, someone out there was listening.
48,972 messages poured in.
They condensed them all into one greeting. Read it aloud. Recorded it. The voices of children saying hello to a universe that has never said hello back.
They talk about Earth. About the sun and moon. About seasons. About emotions and culture and all the things that make us human.
The message ends: "If you would contact us, we will be happy."
Conditional. Hopeful. Heartbreaking.

August 15, 1983. Between 03:00 and 04:00 UTC.

The Stanford Dish, a 46-meter radio telescope in California was aimed at Altair. One of the brightest stars in our night sky. 16.7 light years away.
The date isn't random. It's Tanabata.
The Japanese festival celebrating the meeting of Vega and Altair. The story of two celestial lovers separated by the Milky Way, allowed to meet once a year. Fifteen kids who submitted messages get to witness the transmission. ABC, NBC, CBS are there. There's a photo of a Japanese child being interviewed by a reporter. The message transmits at 423 MHz. 30 kilowatts of power. Traveling at the speed of light. Then it's gone.

The original 48,972 messages were placed in a metal canister. Buried near the Stanford Dish. Marked with a commemorative plaque. When I tried to find information about the transmission at SRI International, i did not find any records from 1983, it was as if they were lost. The modulation technique is unknown; the exact format is unclear. Even the people who built our communication systems couldn't keep track of this message.
It's like the whole thing happened in a parallel universe.

Try finding a western source from 1983 that mentions this.
Go ahead. I'll wait.

The Arecibo message gets analyzed in every documentary. The Golden Record is legendary. We talk about them endlessly. We build museums around them.
But 48,972 Japanese children said hello to the universe and we collectively forgot.

Anyways the message should have reached Altair around 1999. If anyone was listening. If they replied immediately. We would have heard back around 2015.
We didn't.

Most of those kids are in their fifties now. They have jobs, families, lives they never imagined in 1983. They've probably forgotten they once wrote a message to aliens. But somewhere between here and Altair, their words are still traveling. A radio wave carrying voices from 1983. Kids who believed in contact. Scientists who put ethanol jokes in interstellar messages. A culture that looked at the stars and wanted to introduce itself.
299,792,458 meters per second. Never stopping. Never slowing down.

There's a plaque near the Stanford Dish.

A message of peace and friendship from the children of Japan was transmitted from this location towards the star Altair in the constellation Aquila under the guidance of a group of Japanese scientists.

No one visits it. No one talks about it. It marks the spot where humanity reached out and the world looked away.

I think about those kids sometimes.
Writing their messages. Imagining alien hands opening them. Believing in the possibility that we're not alone.
And I think about us now. How we've sent probes to the edge of the solar system. How we've taken pictures of black holes. How we can sequence genomes and edit genes and build machines that think.
But we can't remember 48,972 children saying hello.
We're so busy looking for signals from space. Scanning the skies. Building bigger telescopes. Better receivers.
Maybe we should have paid attention to what we said.

References

• Weekly Shōnen Jump, Vol. 16, No. 21 (May 9, 1983). "Call to the Cosmos '83" campaign announcement. Shueisha. pp. 2-4.

• Weekly Shōnen Jump, Vol. 16, No. 47 (November 7, 1983). "Call to the Cosmos '83: E.T.くん応答せよ!" Coverage of the Message to Altair transmission. Shueisha. pp. 4-7.

• Hirabayashi, Hisashi & Miyauchi, Katsunori (1987). E.T.からのメッセージ: 地球外文明探查講義 [Message from E.T.: Lectures on Extraterrestrial Civilization]. Asahi Shuppansha. pp. 205-220.

• Hirabayashi, Hisashi (2014). 宇宙人に会いたい!: 天文学者が探る地球外生命のなぞ [I Want to Meet Aliens!: An Astronomer Explores the Mystery of Extraterrestrial Life]. Gakken. pp. 58-60.

• Monnier, J.D. et al. (2007). "Imaging the Surface of Altair." Science, 317(5836), 342-345.

• Communication with Stephen Muther, Senior Research Engineer, SRI International (February 2025). Photograph of commemorative plaque provided.

• Pink Tentacle (2008). "Alien e-mail reply to arrive in 2015?""

• The Asahi Shimbun (August 2023). "Japanese astronomers await alien response after 40 years."

• Newsweek (September 27, 2023). "Japanese Astronomers Await Alien Response to Message Sent 40 Years Ago."

• Wikipedia contributors. "Message to Altair.".

• Narusawa, Shin-ya (2023). JAXA Usuda Space Observatory observation of Altair (August 22, 2023).

• Sociostudies.org. "The Message to Altair Project."

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Special thanks to Shin-ya Narusawa for providing scans of the original 13 bitmaps, and to Stephen Muther at SRI International for the photograph of the commemorative plaque.