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What on earth will the aliens think? Bebo goes into space
August 4, 2008
Today saw the launch of A Message from Earth, a “ground-breaking digital time capsule that will be created entirely by the Bebo community this summer and beamed into deep space on a 120 trillion-mile journey.”
The Bebo page has a video introduction by someone called Venetia, who tells us that there’s a planet 20.5 light years away that is very similar to Earth, “and could, in fact, hold life”. In fact we have no idea, but don’t let that stop you.
Bebo users can submit text messages, photographs and drawings to be beamed into space. So what should we send? The press release helps out: “From our natural planet, the achievements of mankind or the worst traits of humanity to a best friend or a favourite celebrity, nothing is too big or small to be included.”
Celebrities are also being asked to participate. So far the list includes: Gillian Anderson of The X Files, Chris Carter (creator of The X Files), Buzz Aldrin (second man on the moon) and broadcaster-astronomer Patrick Moore, which is hardly “the broad spectrum of leading figures in the world of music, sport, fashion, film, politics” promised by the project.
But more worryingly, the last few messages left by commenters on the Bebo page don’t exactly augur well for the content to be sent. So far we have: “What Is This?” and “you phoned me up about this job and i wasnt in and you said u were going to phone back but you didnt”.
A nice idea, but is this really the best way of communicating with aliens? I agree that it’s time we moved on from sending pictures of Vitruvian man or strange golden records (see picture above) into space, but I fear that if any other life forms do intercept the messages, they might deem us not worthy of a reply.
Tags: bebo, space, timecapsule
People do know it’s going to take 20.5 years for the message to get there and 20.5 years for a reply to get here (assuming a reply is even sent)? So that’s 41 years before we have any clue if this has worked, and it is a long shot that there exists inteligent life on that planet.
Worse still how are we going to encode the data for images in such a way aliens will understand? I doubt they have read the JPEG2000 standard! Text may be ok, but images?
Why not just transmit the list of primes as some kind of pulse, most inteligent races should recognise this.
Posted by: Andy | August 4th, 2008 at 7:59 pm | Report this commentHeh, the aliens who find it will be wondering where the inhabitable planet is that we seem to know about. That should cause a small crisis somewhere
Posted by: Mike | August 4th, 2008 at 8:42 pm | Report this commentA line of primes! This makes the asumtion that these life forms have numbers, vision, mathmatics, have developed in a route mathmatics that include primes, you also asume they can read our number system. This type of message is pointless.
Posted by: James | August 4th, 2008 at 10:11 pm | Report this comment…maybe mention that we have http://www.limofoundation.org/ in some mobile devices ? after all, most of the mobile gizmo world uses Qualcomm propietary chips and video apps. exclusively and even Google mobile gizmo does, which would make us look like “not too smart” , so the fact that Linux is available in mobile devices , that should make clear that we are moving forward…
Posted by: blogger | August 4th, 2008 at 10:14 pm | Report this commentThey would have to be looking in our part of the sky at that exact same time it gets there, presuming anyone is there the chances of them actually picking it up and then been able to interpret it are so remote it’s not even worth contemplating. I’m all for potential contact with et species but this is just pointless. We should listen for a while first before sending out messages, and not spam the airwaves with random rubbish. Who knows they might even be as nasty as human beings, we shouldn’t assume either way, and be cautious. The msg sent should have been “intelligent life possibly in the direction of this message”
Posted by: John | August 5th, 2008 at 3:15 am | Report this commentcommenting on this (A line of primes! This makes the asumtion that these life forms have numbers, vision, mathmatics, have developed in a route mathmatics that include primes, you also asume they can read our number system. This type of message is pointless)
Posted by: tam | August 6th, 2008 at 9:33 am | Report this commentthis i beleve is not pointless as you are useing computers that use number systems because computers are just 1s and 0s so the other life forms would need to understand numbers to even see the message that was being sent
As many of us are aware this sort of thing is utter nonsense,just like ‘SETI’, the reality is that there are ‘other beings’ living on ‘our Moon’ which of course is ‘theirs’ and furthermore, they walk among us, and nobody notices. Their craft are seen everyday and have been for centuries, I have seen at least half a dozen in the skies above Southern England.
Posted by: Clive Burghard | August 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am | Report this commentPlease send lots of celebrity material Bebo, preferably leathery old Rolling Stones pictures and shots of Paris Hilton, in that way the aliens will seriously underestimate our intelligence and abilities.
Posted by: Paul Freeman | August 6th, 2008 at 12:19 pm | Report this commenti think they should send a can of carling.. maybe some pictures… but life could mean anything… birds have lives.. they cant exactly understand what we do?? but maybe…41 years later… hmmm
Posted by: Mike | August 6th, 2008 at 3:50 pm | Report this commentThe list of “celebrities” listed surely would result in aliens avoiding us for many years to come. Cool idea though to open it up to the social media rather than letting some professor in a lab somewhere decide how to represent the planet
Posted by: Paul Stallard | August 6th, 2008 at 4:44 pm | Report this commenti think this is interesting but is this really what we want !!!!!!!
Posted by: Max Land | August 7th, 2008 at 7:48 am | Report this commentAliens will send ‘lol’
Posted by: kieran bilginer | August 7th, 2008 at 11:12 am | Report this commentWhat a brilliant idea, let’s advertise ourselves to the galaxy as a bunch of borderline illiterate teenagers. I’m sure any advanced civilisation that picks up on our little broadcast will be tripping over themselves to get to Earth after that.
Posted by: Smudge | August 7th, 2008 at 12:40 pm | Report this commentThere is a high chance of intelligent life on that planet, i mean look at earth, ok, maybe not so much of intellegence and i say that as a human, but we have life, and civilisations. and anyway, planets like earth are extremely rare, so i hink it’s wort a look and if need be, a wait
Posted by: DJ | September 25th, 2008 at 7:34 pm | Report this commentGreat idea, but see SentForever.com’s website at www.sentforever.com as we have been transmitting people’s personal messages into deep space since early 2008. Our messages will travel for the rest of eternity!
Posted by: Chris T | October 13th, 2008 at 11:18 pm | Report this commentThey’ll propbably get addicted to it too. It isn’t brilliant anyway. I mean, no IM? What will the aliens think!
Posted by: FJ | October 29th, 2008 at 12:40 am | Report this comment