Beatle Greetings
By now I'm sure everyone is aware of the NASA publicity stunt to transmit The Beatles' "Across The Universe" towards the 48th brightest star in the sky (Polaris). This raises a few obvious questions. Firstly, why are they sending a Beatles song to a star? Given the way the stunt is being framed in the media, it does give the impression of trying to communicate with alien life but as Phil points out, Polaris is a pretty unlikely place for life as we know it. The real reasons are to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the song, the 50thanniversary of NASA, 45 years of the Deep Space Network and 50 yearssince the launch of Explorer 1.
In terms of communication with ET, there are existing protocols - set up by the SETI Permanent Study Group - that discourage deliberate attempts to broadcast our existence such as the one happening tonight. Sending messages in this way is named active-SETI or METI - Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence - and back in 2005 the Study Group proposed a scale - the San Marino Scale - to quantify the impact of such transmissions on the occupants of the Earth. The scale ranges from "Insignificant" to "Extraordinary" and gives some idea of the potential hazard that comes from shouting in the jungle. In this NASA-Beatles stunt, the transmitted power levels are likely to be quite low compared to the output of our Sun so I don't think the level of concern would get above "Minor" at most. Of course various people in the past have read poetry to the Moon (MP3, 1.9 MB), beamed 2 million Craigslist ads into space, and sent pixellated graphics to globular cluster M13. This isn't hugely different.
On an aside, I note that the music of The Beatles is still within copyright and NASA are transmitting it in MP3 format. NASA do have clearance to transmit it but ET don't have clearance to receive it (they will also need an MP3 decoder). I hate to think that a first contact might be followed by RIAA lawyers slapping law-suits on the unfortunate interstellar 'downloaders'.
Comments: Beatle Greetings
The Beatles material being broadcast may be copyrighted today as NASA sends it out but the copyrights will have long expired by the time anyone orbiting around Polaris would receive it.
If the human race eventually does away with some of the red tape and the politics involved with space we will probably travel to Polaris and be there long before The Beatles song. :)
Posted by Craig E Whitman Sr on Monday 04th Feb 2008 (21:26 UTC)
Craig, I did think of that whilst writing the post and cowardly decided to ignore it ;-)
I'm not convinced that we have defined conventions for describing if something is happening in the past or the future for these sorts of distances. In some sense we think of events as having happened as we observe them as that is when the information got to us (at light speed). The closest example in everyday life might be thunder. We all know that the sound was created in the past but we tend to describe it as having happened when we hear it. I'm sure the RIAA's lawyers would use this line of argument - that whoever intercepts the message is getting it in 2008 - if they thought they could make something from it.
Posted by Stuart on Tuesday 05th Feb 2008 (01:04 UTC)