Hi it’s us !

In the last days, I’ve been surfing around the web to find what we as humans have been doing in order to get in contact with extraterrestrial beings. Here is what I have found on my way so far…

The photo shows a part of the so-called Pioneer plaque which was placed on board of the Pioneer 10 (launched March 2, 1972) and Pioneer 11 (launched April 5, 1973) spacecrafts, featuring a pictorial message from humanity (among other things) intended to be found by extraterrestrial beings.

This photo shows the Voyager Golden Record which is actually a phonograph record included into two Voyager spacecrafts which launched in 1977. The record is also intended to be found (and played) by extraterrestrial beings and contains sounds as well as images to highlight the diversity of life on Earth: from music of Bach, Mozart, Chuck Berry, and also a speech of U.S. president Jimmy Carter (which I personally really like)…

We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

Scientists estimate that it will take around 40,000 years (!) until the spacecraft will be close to another star.

Other attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial beings are to send messages directly to certain stars. These messages – often called “cosmic calls” – consist of text, audio, image and video files which are encoded and transmitted as radio signals. For example a message was sent to the star system 16 Cyg A on May 24, 1999, with an estimated arrival time on November 2069. So it takes quite a long time before the signal reaches the target. There are many more messages sent, a list can be found here.

It seems most of the pictorial messages have been sent in the seventies. The only active communication attempts nowadays are radio signals / cosmic calls.

To sum up, it shows that we don’t yet have the right tools to reach out to other stars and extraterrestrial beings. What bugs me most is the fact that even radio signals travel too slow to reach other stars within an appropriate time frame. That’s frustrating. 😉