34 year-old news; I first read this stuff in Carl Sagan's book, 'Cosmos', but it's still fascinating.

I wondered the same thing when I first read about it: how super-intelligent would these aliens need to be to figure out any of what we were trying to tell them here. Just the first step of arranging the bits into a 23 x 73 grid based solely on the fact that those are two primes is a bit of a stretch.

The prime thing doesn't seem like a stretch to me, the real stretch is that something there might happen to be in exactly the correct part of space, looking exactly in the right direction (toward us) during exactly the right window of time.

I just made an updated binary message to send to our alien friends. (And no, it's not in ASCII text)

It's and interesting story . . . but you guys gotta think that the scientists were all smokin' weed one night . . 'okay, okay .. we send this binary coded message into space that has image of this dude, some squiggly lines .. . and, and . .oh, wait. . .you have to understand the concept of prime numbers even to set up the picture . . uh. . But the greatest thing is that we put this picture of a big penis on the bottom of it. . .when an alien chicks see it, she will definitely let us touch all six of her boobs. . . . . '