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A Group Of Scientists Wants To Light Up Space With Lasers

As we're talking about coming into contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms, all this chatter about data and signals might seem a bit boring. So how about instead we talk about humanity's efforts to shoot the sky with a big cannon solely to see if anyone notices it?

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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A Gas-Sniffing AI Could Tell Us Which Planets To Spam

The problem of space communication is that star systems are, like, really far away and stuff. By the time radio signals can reach other planets, they've long since orbited out of the trajectory. What we really need is a system to continually update the best targets and then keep sending them messages over and over again. Basically, we have to turn our planet into an alarm clock and hope the aliens come over just so they can hit the snooze button.

While radio waves may seem hopelessly old-fashioned for contacting hyper-intelligent species (who probably prefer podcasts anyway), they're some of the strongest and most resilient signals we can muster, which at least increases the chance drastically of something or someone picking them up. Carl Sagan began this process in the 1970s, when he and the head of SETI sent out a series of radio wave transmissions that could only carry some very crude ASCII art.

SETI"S-E-N-D_N-U-D-E-S"

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.

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You Could Actually Phone Space

Remember when phones were mainly used to make calls instead of Googling stuff to win arguments at parties? Yeah, us neither. But back in the 2000s, a group of rad radio engineers decided to create a new phone frontier and find the last creatures in the Universe still willing to accept a call.

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.

Talk To Aliens"S-E-N-D_N-U-D-E-S"

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.

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Send The Aliens The Whole Damn Internet

If we do wind up contacting aliens, it's best we make a good first impression before their proton cannons make the impression for us. To do that, we have to present them with the best of what humanity has to offer. So do we show them our science? Our art? Maybe some Brahms will lighten the mood? No. The most promising way to draw in aliens is not by cherry-picking our best moments, but simply dumping every single bit of dumb information about of our existence into their laps at once. We're talking, of course, about the internet.

Arguing the case for sending our cat GIFs into the beyond is Seth Shostak, the director of the Center for SETI Research, who argues that the internet has become the most complete documentation of the culture and history of planet Earth (for better or worse). We could literally shoot the internet into space with a laser beam which could send out all of this data in a matter of days. It's also self-decoding; the amount of written and spoken language is repeated millions of times over, so it can be used to translate itself, sort of like a Rosetta Stone of dank memes.

Ivan Kopylov /Adobe StockCounter-proposal: Simplify the whole thing by sending this, which is a pretty spot-on summary.

Why is this such an attractive option to scientists? For one, it doesn't make any declaration of intent, and it doesn't invite any kind of response, meaning aliens would be much less likely to misinterpret it. It would also put an end to the endlessly debatable dilemma of what message to send by just saying, "Screw it, send them everything and let them figure it out." And for those of us worried about shouting millions of racist Facebook rants to alien races, it's unlikely that Gleep Glorps from the Crab Nebula will have any way of relating to our culture in such a detailed way with their wholly incomprehensible alien minds. Still, we should at least cut out all those forum posts making fun of the aliens in Independence Day to be safe.

You can find Marina Reimann at Gamefully Unemployed on Twitch (@gamefully_Un), as well as various podcasts about movies, games, and unpopular opinions.

The best aliens we'll ever see are from the 1979 classic.

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For more, check out 6 Space Projects That Will Guarantee Aliens Will Hate Us and 5 Insane Theories About Why We Haven't Discovered Alien Life.

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