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

5

There Are Already Ads In Space (Of Course)

How to greet our future extraterrestrial overlords is a question that has puzzled space nerds for ages. But a company called the Deep Space Communications Network, with grand boldness unburdened by responsibility, has already shot out its answer on how to best simulate our everyday culture: By sending aliens tons and tons of internet ads.

For those of you who may not know, Craigslist is essentially an online personals section where users / serial killers can post ads for secondhand cars, weird sex stuff, roommate hunts, weird sex stuff, landscaping, and mostly weird sex stuff. And when, in 2005, the DSCN pulled the stunt of beaming the first ever website to the stars, for some insane reason, they decided to go with the website that's been used as evidence in more criminal investigations than all others combined. The transmission held over a hundred thousand listings from Craigslist, along with an audio recording explaining that all this junk is currently available on earth. DSCN's vice president defended the choice by saying that he felt Craigslist "represents a wide cross-section of society" -- and he's right, if the goal were to let aliens know we're an entire species obsessed with getting a good deal on a dubiously stained couch.

CraigslistStained from, you know, the weird sex stuff.

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.

4

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?

3

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"

2

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.

1

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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