5 Crazy Ways We're Trying To Talk To Aliens (Right Now)

Unfortunately, this move opened the previously untapped alien demographic for soulless corporations, so of course others have gotten in on the action. Doritos (yes, Doritos) launched their own interstellar communication project in 2008. Dubbed the Doritos Broadcast Project, Doritos picked one 30-second ad from a competition and beamed it from the Arctic Circle at a specific star system a mere 40-odd light years away. And for some reason, this was the ad they went with:

Even ignoring how dangerous it is to depict Doritos as a sentient lifeform intelligent enough to have tribal religion -- no less when contacting aliens -- that's the dumbest thing we've ever shot to space since those earthworms. Yet the head of the Doritos Broadcast Project (also known as the Cool Ranch Think Tank, we assume) is wildly optimistic about the ad, saying that we "shouldn't be too surprised if the first aliens start arriving on planet Earth immediately demanding a bag of Doritos." That or the head of the head of the Doritos Broadcast Project. We can see why he'd prefer his own prediction.

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The scientific community's version of a diss track, METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was started by a group of scientists who were frustrated with the NASA-funded SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and it's failure to find any space emperors to chat with.

METI's goal is simple but audacious: Blast a laser brighter than the sun into space for a nanosecond and see if there's an alien civilization around advanced enough to pick up on it. It's the cosmic equivalent of firing your revolver in the air to get everyone's attention in the saloon.

Why would this work? Because even we could probably manage in reverse. In 2011, astronomers spotted something in orbit around a distant star nicknamed Tabby's Star which might be a giant space station or collection of space stations. They spotted this potential "alien megastructure" using a technique called transit photometry, which allows us to identify planets by noticing how their orbit blocks the light of other stars. So the theory is that if we clever monkey folk can already gather data from such minor disturbances (even if unintentionally), imagine how easy it'll be for intelligent lifeforms to pick up on an artificial laser beams blasting through the sky like we're trying to turn the beautiful cosmos into a Led Zeppelin concert!

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But the problem is still that we don't where exactly to send those signals. Fortunately, there's a robot sniffer dog that can help us. Researchers at University College London created an AI dedicated to finding likely alien habitats, RobERt (Robotic Exoplanet Recognition). RobERt's brain is called a deep-belief neural network (DBN), which works just like the human brain, except a bazillion times more efficiently. This big brain is constantly identifying planetary gases, which let's RobERt decide whether a planet could potentially support human and, by extension, extraterrestrial life. So yes, the Smelloscope from Futurama is now real. RobERt is right about 99.7 percent of the time, according to testing, which means it's such an amazing gas detector that it could tell its operator's lunch merely from smelling his farts.

Targeting planets sniffed out by RobERt, scientists then send strong electromagnetic waves into the interstellar wind towards them. It's a little like throwing rocks blindly off a bridge and hoping they land in a boat, and then hoping that boat turns around and comes back to see who the hell is throwing rocks, but it's more exact than picking a random point in the sky and trying to sell it Doritos. But it's a game of patience. It could take centuries, millennia, or even longer before we get a hit. Researchers are therefore suggesting building a sort of automatic "alarm clock" system, which would kick in after the collapse of humanity and continue sending regular transmissions until the end of time, with the hopes of drawing some star-striding archaeologists to our dead planet. Having our bleached skulls displayed in an alien museum? Sign us up!

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In 2005, a group called the Civilian Space eXploration Team (CSXT) built a giant antenna, called the "Intergalactic Transmitter," which runs 24/7, much like a convenience store or select Subway locations. Simultaneously, they launched the very straightforward website talktoaliens.com (now sadly defunct / shut down by the shadow NSA for knowing too much). Through the website, visitors could leave text messages or place phone calls (at premium sex hotline prices), which the CSXT then beamed into a random direction in space in the vain hope that they'd randomly phone E.T.'s home.

Meanwhile, a radio telescope in Ukraine approached space calling a bit more methodically. Pointing their telescope in the direction of nearby star systems with the highest chances of alien life, they've sent out a few large collections of messages. One of these packets was called "Teenage Message to the Stars," and was completely composed by teens. Which might be a good thing, if it turns out any pugnacious space-faring civilizations are deeply sensitive and susceptible to mockery.

Now, is it a good idea that any dweeb with an internet connection could have potentially become the de facto ambassador of humanity to another sentient race? That's not something to worry about. Even the Talk to Aliens team acknowledged that with a range of only a few light years, there's very little chance any honest-to-Xenu extraterrestrials will ever respond. It's probably better anyway that the first message sent to aliens most likely remains the beautifully crafted olive branch recorded by a Carl Sagan. Better that than the first-ever galactic voyagers we meet thinking we communicate solely through dick pics.

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