A Kentucky city has come up with a unique way to promote tourism in the Bluegrass State. The idea was to blast an invitation to aliens who might be living in a star system 40 light years away.
Lexington scientists, along with VisitLex's clever advertising team, sent coded infrared laser messages to TRAPPIST-1. TRAPPIST-1 is a star with at least seven exoplanets that are thought to be potentially habitable.
According to the countdown running on the VisitLex website at the time of this writing, at Lexington and approximately 235 trillion miles from Earth, the message was 38 years, 262 days, 7 hours, 9 minutes… and 42 seconds before the destination. It won't reach. But scientists see that period actually working in their favor.
“We're targeting the TRAPPIST-1 system because if there's someone there looking, we might actually get an answer in someone's lifetime,” said Astrochemistry, Space said Dr. Robert Rodder, a University of Kentucky computer engineering professor with a series of credentials including biology and space science. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Life) Program.
Dubbed “the world's first interstellar tourism campaign” by VisitLex, the message mobilized a team of Kentucky linguists, scientists, and even science fiction experts to broadcast transmissions to distant stars. edited.
The message is a coded bitmap, an image plotted with simple pixels, containing information about Earth, including prime numbers, the periodic elements that make up life in this corner of the universe, and renderings of humans and horses. I am.
The message also included the ingredients of bourbon, Lexington's favorite export, and the molecular structure of dopamine, which Visitlex noted was “because Lexington is fun.”
The team also included a rural landscape of the rolling Kentucky hills, a message written in plain English that read “Go to Lexington,” and a recording of Lexington blues master T.D. Young wailing on an electric guitar. .
“Of all the things we've been sending out into space, how about a positive, friendly message?” said Dr. Brenna Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky.
VisitLex said the message and its broadcast were approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.
It may have been the first time a travel brochure was launched into space, but it wasn't the first time a message was sent to extraterrestrials that might be listening in on humans.
The Voyager deep space probes, launched in 1977, both carried identical golden phonograph records that would alert any intelligent extraterrestrials they might encounter to what life on Earth would be like. It was intended to give you an idea of what it looks and sounds like.
These include music from around the world, recordings in different languages, natural sounds, signals that can be translated into over 100 images of life on Earth, a map showing the sun's position relative to nearby celestial bodies, and many more intended It contained the symbol. It will help you decipher the records.
Currently about 15 billion miles from Earth (about 0.006% of the way to TRAPPIST), Voyager I has penetrated deeper into space than any other man-made object.
Another signal sent into deep space was the Arecibo message, broadcast in 1974 from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.
Similar to the message sent from Kentucky, the Arecibo message utilizes a pixel-based format to include human numbering systems, regional element symbols, representations of DNA strands, a map of the solar system, and a rendering of human appearance. communicated. Other information.
The message will be sent to the Messier 13 globular cluster, about 25,000 light-years from Earth, and will take about the same amount of time to reach.
Attempts to make contact with other world civilizations may be well-meaning, but many scientists warn against it.
For example, Stephen Hawking famously advised against it in a 2010 Discovery Channel documentary.
“If aliens visited us, the outcome would be similar to what happened when Columbus landed in America, which was not a good outcome for Native Americans,” the physicist said.
