Is there anybody out there?
As well as loving Space, the nightclub, we also love space, the final frontier. Today’s lesson has a more historical approach as I take a look at some of humanity’s more ‘off the wall’ efforts to make contact with our universal neighbours. For some, the thought of being alone in the universe seems logical, others feel that if we aren’t alone then our neighbours will come to visit us and then there are the people who are actively extending a hand into the cosmos in the hope that it will be greeted halfway. Just how this hand may be construed by extraterrestrial life has been the subject of much controversy; are we extending an open hand of welcome or a clenched fist?
Star Whores
The first radio message transmitted into space was the Arecibo message sent in 1974 and was a small grid of photos displayed as a 23 by 73 grid. Mathematicians amongst you may have noticed that these are two prime numbers, which as we can clearly see from the film Contact are very important in the search for ET. The message is expected to arrive at it’s destination, globular cluster M13, in the year 26,974. Benign as its content may seem to us, there are many people who fear that other worldly intelligence may not read it in the same way. In fact these people believe that even the way in which the message is sent, a radio pulse directed at a certain place, may be seen to have hostile connotations.
In 1986 Joe Davis sent a message to 2 neighbouring star systems, Eridani and Tau Ceti. The content of his messages was subject to so much controversy that after only a few minutes of transmission the project was shut down by the US air force. Davis, an artist and research affiliate at MIT, had become concerned that no representation of human genitals had been sent into space. To remedy this oversight he led the project which would later go on to transmit the sounds of vaginal contractions to neighbouring star systems. In order to ensure the best sound quality Davis enlisted the help of ballet dancers and their toned contractions. Although the messages will have arrived at their destinations in the late 90s we are still waiting on a reply.
Over the next few decades humanity filled the universe with messages beamed at the locations that scientists believe could support life. One star in particular, Ursae Majoris 47, has been subject to a veritable bucket load of intergalactic spam. One notable example came from a group of Russian teenagers led by Alexander Zaitsev who sent an analogue signal of a piece of electronic music recored on a theremin in 2001. Seven years later in 2008 the star was subject to a 6 hour broadcast of a Doritos advert. Earlier in the year NASA had broadcast The Beatles song Across the Universe to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary. What must our neighbours think we do with our time here on earth?
The horse head nebula
Last year Joe ‘vaginal contractions’ Davis made a come back to the scene with a transmission to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Arecibo message. Somewhat unfortunately in my opinion his choice of this subject was not the sound of farting in the bath or something similar, but the genetic code of the enzyme RuBisCo which is used in photosynthesis. Davis, always looking to subvert the system reasoned that being one of the slowest and inefficient enzymes, RubisCo was undoubtably representative of life on earth. It is also worth noting that Davis brought the data to be transmitted by a multi-million dollar telescope on his iPhone.
Whether or not these messages will ever be received and what reactions they invoke we may never know. Not having received any messages ourselves may mean, as many believe, that we are alone in the universe. It may of course mean the we don’t have the technology to accept signals that have been sent to us. One thing is for sure, Joe Davis was sending cunts into space long before Richard Branson.
SETI – Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
Tags: Aliens, Andrew Livesey, Doritos, ET, Science, Space, Vaginal Contractions
