Cosmic Call to Send Earthly Message to Five Stars
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Space entrepreneurs plan to beam best wishes on Saturday toward five sun-like stars, hoping intelligent beings will get the message.
The broadcast will emanate from a 230-foot wide dish at the Evpatoriya Radio Astronomy Facility in Ukraine. Mission control is at Roswell, New Mexico, where some believe an alien spaceship came to Earth 56 years ago this week.
The "Cosmic Call" was coordinated by Team Encounter, a Houston-based aerospace company that among other ventures allows customers to "name a star" and send messages to its constellation.
Saturday's broadcast will feature messages from some 90,000 people, each of whom has paid at least $24.95 for the service.
An Indiana family issued an invitation to their farm: "Please call 24 hours in advance so that we may make your visit one to remember."
Mark from Belgrave, Australia, sent a quotation from Albert Einstein: "Imagination is more important than understanding."
From Toronto, Canada, came a common earthly request: "Please send money. Any kind of money. Universal money is OK. Alien currency OK. Meteorites are good. Gold, Moon rocks, space junk also good. Send to: Maura, Planet Earth."
Charles Chafer, Team Encounter's chief executive officer, said the project also plans to send scientific messages to the stars, which astronomers have determined are similar to our sun and could therefore harbor unseen Earth-type planets.
INTERSTELLAR ROSETTA STONE
Among those messages is an Interstellar Rosetta Stone, using a mathematical language to convey information about Earth and its human inhabitants. Also included is a copy of a message sent in 1974 from the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the first directed at extraterrestrial intelligence.
"We think space, although real and important and scientific, also needs to be fun if it's going to flourish and survive," Chafer said in a telephone interview. "It's also a very real mission that will be participated in by school kids all over the world, including in Roswell."
Roswell has built up a tourist trade around reports that a "flying disk" came to rest in New Mexico during the first week of July 1947. The International UFO Museum there is holding a UFO Festival over the U.S. July 4-6 Independence Day holiday weekend.
The call -- a powerful digitized broadcast meant to remain comprehensible through interstellar space -- will go through at 5 p.m. in New Mexico (2 a.m. in Ukraine), Chafer said.
"A lot of people giggled at the Wright brothers at a certain point," he said, referring to the U.S. aviation pioneers. "Why shouldn't we be reaching out to communicate? Human beings are an exploring and a communicating species and so it should be fun. It's also fundamental science. What more important question is there in the universe than, 'Are we alone?"'
Seth Shostak, a scientist at the SETI Institute, which aims to explore "the prevalence of life in the universe," said the Cosmic Call was a useful exercise in learning to communicate over interstellar space, but unlikely to prompt a return call.
"It's in a way kind of communicating by putting a bottle with a message in it into the surf at Atlantic City and hoping some astute Europeans get it," Shostak said. "Now it's not impossible that they will, but it's not terribly likely either."
He said messages might be sent at frequent intervals over long periods of time.
"You'd better be prepared to leave the transmitter on for a long, long time, possibly tens of thousands of years -- and that's something we're not prepared to do," he said.
More information is available online at http:/www.teamencounter.com.
By Deborah Zabarenko
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Space entrepreneurs plan to beam best wishes on Saturday toward five sun-like stars, hoping intelligent beings will get the message.
The broadcast will emanate from a 230-foot wide dish at the Evpatoriya Radio Astronomy Facility in Ukraine. Mission control is at Roswell, New Mexico, where some believe an alien spaceship came to Earth 56 years ago this week.
The "Cosmic Call" was coordinated by Team Encounter, a Houston-based aerospace company that among other ventures allows customers to "name a star" and send messages to its constellation.
Saturday's broadcast will feature messages from some 90,000 people, each of whom has paid at least $24.95 for the service.
An Indiana family issued an invitation to their farm: "Please call 24 hours in advance so that we may make your visit one to remember."
Mark from Belgrave, Australia, sent a quotation from Albert Einstein: "Imagination is more important than understanding."
From Toronto, Canada, came a common earthly request: "Please send money. Any kind of money. Universal money is OK. Alien currency OK. Meteorites are good. Gold, Moon rocks, space junk also good. Send to: Maura, Planet Earth."
Charles Chafer, Team Encounter's chief executive officer, said the project also plans to send scientific messages to the stars, which astronomers have determined are similar to our sun and could therefore harbor unseen Earth-type planets.
INTERSTELLAR ROSETTA STONE
Among those messages is an Interstellar Rosetta Stone, using a mathematical language to convey information about Earth and its human inhabitants. Also included is a copy of a message sent in 1974 from the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the first directed at extraterrestrial intelligence.
"We think space, although real and important and scientific, also needs to be fun if it's going to flourish and survive," Chafer said in a telephone interview. "It's also a very real mission that will be participated in by school kids all over the world, including in Roswell."
Roswell has built up a tourist trade around reports that a "flying disk" came to rest in New Mexico during the first week of July 1947. The International UFO Museum there is holding a UFO Festival over the U.S. July 4-6 Independence Day holiday weekend.
The call -- a powerful digitized broadcast meant to remain comprehensible through interstellar space -- will go through at 5 p.m. in New Mexico (2 a.m. in Ukraine), Chafer said.
"A lot of people giggled at the Wright brothers at a certain point," he said, referring to the U.S. aviation pioneers. "Why shouldn't we be reaching out to communicate? Human beings are an exploring and a communicating species and so it should be fun. It's also fundamental science. What more important question is there in the universe than, 'Are we alone?"'
Seth Shostak, a scientist at the SETI Institute, which aims to explore "the prevalence of life in the universe," said the Cosmic Call was a useful exercise in learning to communicate over interstellar space, but unlikely to prompt a return call.
"It's in a way kind of communicating by putting a bottle with a message in it into the surf at Atlantic City and hoping some astute Europeans get it," Shostak said. "Now it's not impossible that they will, but it's not terribly likely either."
He said messages might be sent at frequent intervals over long periods of time.
"You'd better be prepared to leave the transmitter on for a long, long time, possibly tens of thousands of years -- and that's something we're not prepared to do," he said.
More information is available online at http:/www.teamencounter.com.
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