Aliens will be glad to know that if ever they need to find
an apartment here on Earth, someone has got them covered.
On March 11th at 6:30pm, a company called Deep
Space Communications Network beamed the first commercial transmission of a
website into space.
The message?
Over one hundred thousand separate postings from craigslist.com, the popular
community website that includes classified listings for jobs, housing and other
goods. The transmission included a date and time stamp, as well as an audio
track identifying the message as originating from Earth.
"It's very fitting
that the first [commercial] transmission into space is by a community website
like craiglist because it represents a wide cross
section of society," said Jim Lewis, vice president of Deep Space
Communications Network.
The company is an offshoot of Communications Concepts, Inc.,
a company based in Cape Canaveral,
Florida, that produces live
television coverage of shuttle launches. That same equipment is now being used
to give the public a chance to send messages out to any intergalactic neighbors
that might be listening in a service slated to become widely available within
the next month.
Lewis told SPACE.com
that the company is currently in talks with craigslist
to broadcast another transmission on to coincide with the planned Discovery
launch, NASA's first post-Columbia shuttle mission.
Commercial messages have long been transmitted into space, inadvertantly since
the first radio and television signals were generated, but the Deep Space
Communications Network joins a short list of intentional transmissions aimed at
contacting someone--anyone--out in the Universe.
Another company, talktoaliens.com, offers a similar service
but with an added twist: users can send a text message or they can dial a phone
number and have their voices beamed live into space via a custom designed
parabolic dish antenna dubbed the "Intergalactic Transmitter". The
service has been available since March 7th, and the antenna is
operational 24-hours a day.
Talktoaliens.com is operated by a small group of radio and
broadcasts engineers who were part of the Civilian Space eXploration
Team, or CSXT, a group that made news in May of last year when they
successfully launched the first amateur rocket into space. The company is
headed by Eric Knight, CSXT's former avionics
manager.
Neither of the companies target specific stars or particular
points in space for their transmissions. Deep Space Communications Network aims
their antenna at coordinates where there are no known satellites, and they estimate
that their transmissions will travel approximately 1-3 light years.
Talktoaliens.com states that their antenna is designed to sweep through as much
of the Milky Way Galaxy as possible.
The two services are the latest in a long tradition of radio
CETI--or Communications with ExtraTerrestrial
Intelligence--attempts. The first, known as the Arecibo
Message, occurred in 1974 when two Cornell University scientists beamed an
encoded radio message that included an image of a human figure and the
structure of DNA toward the great globular cluster M13, 25,000 light years
away.
In 1999 and 2003, a more elaborate set of messages known
collectively as the Cosmic Call was sent out from a radio telescope in the Ukraine to
nearby star systems deemed likely to harbor life. In 2001, another message,
composed by Russian teens and called the Teenage Message to the Stars, was also
transmitted from the Ukraine
radio telescope.
Knight describes his company as a public service. "The goal
is to give every citizen on planet earth who has access to phone or computer an
equal opportunity to use this service," he said. "If you leave it to only
a select few, it will end up being some sort of elite processed message."
Knight admits that the chances of an alien response are slim
but said that it would be the ultimate reward. "It's the reason so many
people are listening or talking into space and trying to establish dialogue
with alien races."
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