Tweets in Space!
That's the plan for the National Geographic Channel, as part of its promotion for a TV show about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Channel staff will gather up tweets sent to #chasingufos on June 29 and blast them into space via Puerto Rico's Arecibo Radio Telescope.
It's all part of an effort to get people to watch a TV program about something that happened 35 years ago. The event was the "Wow" signal, a 72-second transmission from space received way back in Year 1 of Star Wars movie releases (1977). Some lucky astronomer had his receiver trained to a certain frequency and got a big surprise when a very unusual signal turned up. (For the record, it was 6EQUJ5. SETI geeks will be familiar with this.)
Anyway, back to TV, so this publicity stunt (and I am NOT being paid for this blog post) is to air on August 15, the day in 1977 when the Wow signal got noticed here on Earth. The tweets will enter space on the same day.
So, on to the unknowns: We don't know what the frequency meant (still don't), we don't know where it came from (the telescope that "saw" it isn't around anymore), and we don't know how to find it again. The whole thing could be just an interstellar belch. But it might not be. It just might be ET phoning home.
Through some serious number-crunching, scientists have narrowed to three the possible origin locations of the Wow signal, so they'll be blasting the tweets to all three, just in case.
The project managers insist that it's all about the crowd-sourcing, in that they promise to send out any and all tweets posted on that day and bearing that hashtag. This would be a far cry from the gold-disc standard of virtual noise that went out on the Voyager spacecraft because all of that material was chosen by closed committee.
The hope is that the sheer volume of noise created by the tweet blast will be enough for anyone who happens to be listening or otherwise hurtling within earshot an opportunity to sit up and take notice.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment