Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Coffee!! Will the space aliens retweet us if we promise to all keep the faith?

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

File:A small cup of coffee.JPG

In “Romantic or Reckless? The Plan to Message Aliens with Twitter” (Wired Science, September 21, 2012), Jason Kehe reveals,

If you’ve ever pondered what you would say to an alien, you may get that chance between 7:30 and 8 p.m. PT tonight.

That’s the goal of Tweets in Space, a project — sorry, “performance art piece” — by two guys with starry, starry eyes. As part of this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern will spend 30 minutes capturing every tweet with the hashtag #tweetsinspace for later transmission into the (much) wider Twitterverse.

Using a radio transmitter in Florida, they plan to beam our messages to GJ667Cc, an exoplanet that might, just maybe, possibly, have the required attributes that would allow it to theoretically support life (as we know it). Four to six weeks after Friday’s event, the planet will move into alignment (just barely) with the transmitter. And that’s when Kildall and Stern, a multimedia artist and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will hit send.

The aliens were doubtless just waiting for us to get aligned with the cosmic Twitterverse.

Yes, the coffee was a long time coming. News was co-writing a book.

Comments

Leave a Reply