A Kentucky city has drummed up a unique way to boost tourism in the Blue Grass state — by blasting an invitation to aliens possibly living in a star system 40 lightyears away.
Scientists in Lexington — along with a clever advertising team from VisitLex — sent a coded infrared laser message to TRAPPIST-1, a star with at least seven exoplanets believed to be potentially hospitable to life.
At about 235 trillion miles from Lexington, and Earth, the message won’t reach its destination for 38 years, 262 days, 7 hours, 9 minutes and… 42 seconds, according to a countdown running on VisitLex’s website at the time of writing, but scientists see that duration as actually working in their favor.
“We are targeting the TRAPPIST-1 system because we might actually get an answer in somebody’s lifetime if there’s somebody there watching,” said Dr. Robert Lodder, a University of Kentucky computer engineering professor with a bevy of credentials in astrochemistry, astrobiology, and SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Life) programs.
Dubbed “the world’s first interstellar tourism campaign” by VisitLex, the message drew on a team of Kentucky linguists, scientists — even science fiction experts — to compile the transmission broadcast to the distant star.
The message is a coded bitmap, or simple pixel-plotted image, that contains information about Earth including prime numbers, the periodic elements that are the building blocks for life in our corner of the universe, along with renderings of humans and horses.
Also included in the message are the molecular structures for the elements of Lexington’s favorite export — bourbon — and of dopamine, too, “because Lexington is fun,” VisitLex noted.
The team also threw in a pastoral scene of rolling Kentucky hills, the message “Visit Lexington” written out in plain English, and a recording of Lexington blues master Tee Dee Young wailing on his electric guitar.
“Of all the things we’ve been beaming into space, why not a positive, friendly message?” said University of Kentucky linguistics professor, Dr. Brenna Byrd.
The message and its broadcast were approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, according to VisitLex.
Though it may be the first time a travel brochure was launched into space, the message was far from the first time humans have sent dispatches to alien life that might be out there listening in the cosmos.
The Voyager deep space probes launched in 1977 both contained identical golden phonograph records intended to give intelligent extra terrestrials who might come across them an idea of what life looks and sounds like on Earth.
They included music from around the world, recordings of different languages, nature sounds, signals that can be translated into over 100 images of life on Earth, a map indicating the location of the sun compared to nearby celestial objects, and a number of symbols intended to help decipher the record.
Currently about 15 billion miles away from Earth (about .006% of the way to TRAPPIST), Voyager I has penetrated deeper into space than any other manmade object.
Another signal sent to deep space is the Arecibo message, which was broadcast from the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974.
Like the message sent from Kentucky, the Arecibo message utilized a pixel-based format to communicate humanity’s number system, symbols for local elements, representations of our DNA strands, a map of our solar system, and a rendering of what humans look like, among other details.
That message was sent to the Messier 13 globular cluster, about 25,000 lightyears from Earth, and will take about as many years to reach it.
Well meaning though the efforts to contact civilizations on other world’s may be, many scientists have cautioned that it should not be done.
Stephen Hawking, for one, famously advised against it in a 2010 Discovery Channel documentary.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” the physicist said.