#lonesignal

Ever wanted to contact extraterrestrial intelligences? Well now thanks to a group of scientists and entrepreneurs, you can!

The project - led by Dr Jacob Haqq-Misra - has recommissioned a radio dish in Carmel, California, to send out radio signals to one of our neighboring stars.

The group welcome messages/photos from the public which are then to beamed to the star, Gliese 526. Located in the constellation Bootes, this red dwarf star is only 17.6 light years away from Earth and has been identified as a solar system, with possibly habitable planets!

So what wise words are you going to pass on to our cosmic brethren?!

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See below to find out more about the project which began in June 2013.

https://twitter.com/LoneSignal

https://www.facebook.com/lonesignalsocial

Join us from the comfort of your computer Friday, July 12th at 2PM EDT for our first ever Google+ #MADEhangout that explores Fashion & Technology with our very own CMO, Ernesto Qualizza, a representative from NASA, Jeffrey Marlow from Wired, Mary Huang from The Creators Project, an expert from FashioningTech.com, and Laura Ellner from OnTheRacks!

Get the lowdown on how fashion and technology fit hand-in-hand, why some designers are so inspired by space-age concepts, how groundbreaking technology is allowing you to potentially communicate with alternate lifeforms (via #LoneSignal), and so much more! 

Want to weigh in on the conversation? Tweet us @madefw using our #MADEhangout hashtag!

Lone Signal: Continuous Message Beacon to FInd an Extraterrestrial Civilization and Say Hello

Although scientists have been listening for years to search for indications of other sentient life in the Universe, just a few efforts have been made by humans to purposefully send out messages to the cosmos. Called METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or Active SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), these messages have so far been just one-time bursts of info – or “pulses in time” said Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra.

Haqq-Misra is leading a team of scientists and entrepreneurs who are launching a new initiative called “Lone Signal” which will send the first continuous mass “hailing messages” out into space, starting later this month. They’ll be specifically targeting one star system, Gliese 526, which has been identified as a potentially habitable solar system.

And yes, the general public can participate.

“From the start we wanted to be an experiment where anyone on Earth could participate,” said Haqq-Misra during a press event on June 11, 2013, announcing the project. “Our scientific goals are to discover sentient beings outside of our solar system,” said Lone Star co-founder Pierre Fabre, also speaking at the event. “But an important part of this project is to get people to look beyond themselves and their differences by thinking about what they would say to a different civilization. Lone Signal will allow people to do that.”

Lone Signal will be using the recommissioned radio dish at the Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel, California, one of the dishes used to carry the Apollo Moon landings live to the world.

Lone Signal will be sending two signals: one is a continuous wave (CW) signal, a hailing message that sends a slow binary broadcast to provide basic information about Earth and our Solar System using an encoding system created by astrophysicist and planetary scientist Michael W. Busch. The binary code is based on mathematical “first principles” which reflect established laws that, theoretically, are relatively constant throughout the universe; things like gravity and the structure of the hydrogen atom, etc.

“This hailing message is a language we think could be used to instigate communication,” said Haqq-Misra, “and is the most advanced binary coding currently in use.”

The second signal, embedded in the first signal, will be messages from the people of Earth.

Since Gliese 526 is 17.6 light years from Earth, the messages will be beamed to the coordinates of where the star will be in 17.6 years from now. Even though no planets have been found yet in this system, the Lone Signal team said they are confident planets exist there since missions like Kepler and Corot have found that most stars host multiple planets.

The Lone Signal team is allowing anyone with access to the internet to send the equivalent of one free text message or Twitter message — a 144-character text-based message — into space.

Human explorers in science fiction often find themselves encountering new worlds or alien species. Television series such as Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica as well as films such as Star Wars and Alien have created a diverse cast of alien forms—big, small, with and without antennae, adapted to different climates—in an attempt to characterize the diversity of creatures in a galactic empire. In spite of this visual diversity, many of the explorers of early science fiction found that they could communicate quite easily with extraterrestrial beings in their own native language of English! While this is partly a storytelling device to keep audiences entertained, it is worth asking ourselves: if we do beam messages into space, will the aliens understand?

Any extraterrestrial civilization that is actively searching for radio signals is at least as old, and probably much older, than humanity. In all likelihood, any extraterrestrial beings that we could conceivably contact will be much more advanced than us. Perhaps the aliens are really so much smarter than us that they can learn any languages of Earth with ease. If they do receive our messages—or someday welcome one of our astronauts—maybe they could learn English without breaking a sweat (if in fact they do sweat). Or perhaps they wear a universal translator device that allows them to understand any and all languages in the galaxy. If the galaxy is teeming with an empire of sorts, then perhaps this sort of translation technology is necessary for typical interstellar travelers. Maybe, just maybe, extraterrestrial beings could be able learn to speak like us.

The tricky part would be making sense of all the irrationalities, emotions, and cultural references that form the basis of all Earth languages. Aliens could be excellent mathematicians and could even have an uncanny ability to learn syntax and grammar rules. But would they be able to understand human concepts such as love, hope, anger, beauty, jealousy, or happiness? How would they make sense of words that describe the things of our world—cats, cars, carnivals, and kaleidoscopes—that may be entirely foreign to them? Would extraterrestrial beings even use language? Perhaps they have no sense of hearing at all and communicate in entirely different ways! We can never know for sure, at least until we make first contact. But in the meantime, thinking about the universality of language is at least a first step toward thinking like an alien.

-Pierre Fabre