If you had to sum up Life on Earth in 160 characters, what would you say? If you had to express your own life in 160 characters, what would you say? If you had 160 characters to communicate with somebody from another planet, what would you say? If you had 160 characters to tell ET about what you have lived, what you have felt, what you have dreamed, what you have loved ... what would YOU say?
Wait not more, you can now do just so. That is the original initiative -Hello From Earth- put in place by the Australian science magazine, Cosmos, within the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. It is also sponsored by NASA, the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
"Hello From Earth" aims at sending a friendly, "earthy" signal to the only known-to-date habitable alien planet: Gliese 581d. This interplanetary message will be beamed to Gliese 581d from NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla (Australia) on Friday 28 August 2009. It will be composed of some few hundreds 160-characters text messages (just like an SMS) coming from just about any person in the world that wants to participate. If you are keen to do so and send a little "hello world" greeting to our most likely ET-type neighbor, you can still do so until Monday 24th (hurry up dude!). Just pay a visit to the program official website, log in on the "register" section and … come up with your own, once-in-a-lifetime idea!!
Artist impression of Gliese 581d. Source: European Southern Observatory
Gliese 581d constitutes the first discovered (April 2007) exoplanet -an alien planet outside our Solar System-, that lies in the habitable zone: the so-called area around a planet's star where the temperature is "warm" enough to allow for the existence of liquid water (a key element for life as we know it) on its surface. As a matter of fact, our ET candidate orbits its parent star (Gliese) in about 66 Earth days. Add that up to Gliese 581d being a "rocky planet" -with a solid core the likes of Earth's in terms of composition- and you will get the possibility of oceans and continents. Waters and lands for life to emerge. There is a little particularity regarding Gliese 581 d though: it's about 8 times the size of Earth! For that reason, it receives the charismatic label of "Super Earth". Some astronomers even suggest, a bit jokingly though, that our intelligent counterparts over there, if they exist, may be up to 8 times bigger than us!! No chance for Earth on a "universal" basketball game ;-(
Let's now respond to those little dilemmas that are surely "hunting" some of you: when is this "message" going to reach its destination? Are we going to get a reply? And if so, will I still be here by then? Let's play the numbers then. Gliese 581d finds itself some 20.3 light-years (194 trillion km) away from us, in the Libra constellation if you want to have a look. That implies that, as our electromagnetic signal (similar to what cell carrier's antennas transmit when you send a regular SMS) travels at the speed of light (yeaahhh) it will take 20.3 years for our bunch of binary-coded text messages to reach Gliese 581 d. Now, let's just suppose there is an intelligent (as "smart" as us at least), technology-capable civilization there. Give them a time period of, say, a year to decipher our message: extract the actual information from the "galactic" noise, figure out the codification, the English language, etc. Then, tally up the return-trip and you get a tentative total of about … 41-42 years to get a response! Yeah, my dear fellow, a few of us may still be here by that time. What a pleasure it would be...can you imagine!!
Ok, ok, things are getting a little sci-fi here, aren't they? Well, in fact, no. The likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence existing is not at all negligible in a universe as immense as ours. As a proof to that, Dr. Frank Drake figured out the odds of ET (in our Milky Way) in the sixties. He did so in writing the beautiful equation that bears his name: the Drake Equation. Such count, though trivial at first glance, set the path for an intelligent search of intelligent life through the vastness and darkness of Space.
More around the same lines, despite the apparent craziness of the idea, this is not going to be the first time humanity attempts to communicate with its counterparts out there, much less listen to them. In the early 1970s, the Pioneers probes 10 and 11 (unmanned spacecraft) carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin (Earth) as well as their creators (see the famous design of a male and female bodies in the image below) for the benefit of any other spacefarer that might find them in the distant future. Later on that decade, NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 went a step further in the spirit of the Voyagers, bearing a more ambitious message: a gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images portraying the diversity of life on Earth. For the record, the Voyagers are still going on in their exploratory trip, having already surpassed the bounders of the Solar System, they now found themselves in the interstellar medium. Definitely a super accomplishment for humanity! Other enterprises followed suit, like last year's NASA broadcast (from Madrid's, 64-meter, Deep Space Network antenna) of the Beatle's song "Across the Unvierse" to Polaris, the North Star; or Bob Marley's reggae rhythms being sent spaceward by Cosmic Call -a private venture- a few years ago. As you can witness, my dear alien-seeker, we are eager to communicate, we have stuff to say.
But what about the listening part? Remember the movie "Contact"? With Holy Hunt sitting on those huge antennas, desperately trying to unmask "artificial patterns" from the background noise of the Universe? Well, let me tell you something: this isn't just happening in the movies. Not only we have had some of our humongous, dish-like "ears" permanently tuned in on the "out there" for a while now (since the 80s); but, as our astronomical knowledge furthers, we are starting to point in the right directions. Current NASA's Kepler mission and CNES's (French Space Agency) COROT mission, both looking for Earth-like exoplanets, represent two good examples of mankind's strong efforts to narrow down the entire sky to some countable amount of stars likely to harbor habitable planets. The infinite haystack of heaven is in fact getting smaller, and so our holy needle in it will soon become a lot more "findable". And guess what, a few of us are still going to keep throwing those 5-cents coins at the "Fontanta di Trevi" in Rome, Italy, in exchange of an "space wish". Someday, it will pay off and, till that day comes around, I am just gonna continue believing…in magic ;-)
NASA's Deep Space Network antennas. Source: JPL/DSN NASA
Speaking of life in the Universe, a crucial proof to the Panspermia theory (the seeds of life on Earth having come from other celestial bodies the likes of comets and asteroids) has just been encountered last week. One of the science teams from NASA's Stardust mission found some glycine among the returned samples from the comet Wild 2. Glycine -the simplest amino acid used to make proteins- constitutes a major building block of life as we know it (organic based). So yeah, the ingredients for life are floating out there in space. It's all juts matter of probability.
Probability, you know, like the driving topic of the fascinating Chaos Theory, better know perhaps as the Butterfly Effect. Probability, like the almost zero (0.0000000...something) likelihood of me writing this article and you reading it. So, how come, you are surely wondering. Plain answer, my friend. Because the universe Universe is simply huge!! Certainly, the path that led to you and I being here right now is unique but, have a farmland large enough (say, infinite) and your one-of-a-kind vegetable will grow in pairs. The probability of life in the Universe or, in other words, the mission of the SETI Institute: to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.
In brief, from our end of the story, we are proactively bringing what it is needed to the table: being both eager to understand the information, in all its forms, coming down from the Universe, and broadcast our own. Hence, if a bunch of "evolved monkeys" are capable, I don't see why another planet like ours, or 8 times bigger for that matter, cannot be doing the exact same thing? They may have their own SETI at Gliese 581d, or even a more advanced one, who knows. Possibilities are endless. Nobody expresses it better though than Mr. Wilson da Silva, the Cosmos magazine editor: "We don't know if there's life on Gliese 581d and we don't even know if there's a technical civilization capable of detecting our signal. But we do know that it might have the conditions for life. And as soon as the conditions for life existed on Earth, life emerged." And as for the disturbing dilemmas in our minds, Jacqui Hayes -assistant editor for Cosmos- has the right remedy: "And the question is...will we get a reply? No one knows...but why don't we send a message and find out?"
Here I leave you with the good stuff. Messages from our own selves. From people like you and me that just want to know, that just want to find some company in the infiniteness of Space and maybe, who knows, share a ride together. After all, isn't it what life is all about? Drops of life and love enclosed in 160 characters...
"2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 73 79 83 89 97 101" -Sam
from Adelaide, Australia.
"Chocolate cake: 175g margarine 175g sugar 3 eggs 150g flour 50g cocoa 1tsp baking powder 1tsp vanilla extract Oven: 180C, bake 50 minutes Enjoy!" -Michael Baek from Ishoj, Denmark
"Care to enlighten us about the beginning of the universe? We've narrowed it down to the Big Bang or God." -Swirlz from Sydney, Australia
"hi i am ELias. i am 14 and i comme in peace. i am an earth child and i wanna learn so much about the life on you planet. bye and greathings from the earth." -Elias from Mortsel, Belgium
"Kick it to me! Kick it to me!" -Peter from Sydney, Australia
"Love!Love!Love!" -Marija from Skopje, Macedonia.
"Hey there! This is Jesus from the Blue Planet. In the name of my species -Mankind-, I send you some of our best stuff: Hope and Love. Come, we'll have fun ;-)" -Jesus from Aranda de Duero, Spain.
(You may find more of those beauties in here)
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