If alien life exists, we have probably weirded it out by now

From Arecibo, to the sound of vaginal contractions, to an ad for Doritos—a short history of Earthlings' attempts to communicate with the cosmos. The vaginal sounds recording reached Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti in the late 1990s. New Scientist says, "It is unclear what sort of reply we should expect."

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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PTBartman

Send more Chuck Berry
- CANTFIGHTTHEDITE
  
  Hahaha, nice reference!
betatron

Truth:

I sent a morse code pulse train of neutrinos in the general direction of Polaris in the late 80s, using the Fermilab accelerator neutrino line on a midnight shift. It took about 14 minutes to transmit the message.

My message was “Dinner is served”.
Sekino

Aliens, by now, probably look at us like the total stranger on Facebook who keeps poking you despite having nothing useful- or coherent- to say.

“Ignore”
Anonymous

Imagine if they receive transmissions of “Jersey Shore”. They might deem it universally responsible to destroy our planet. Yikes!
fnc

What if the sound of those contractions translated into some horrible insult in an alien dialect?

Awkward!
- CANTFIGHTTHEDITE
  
  What!? My mother was a saint! Get out!
  - Felton
    
    Hooray for Zoidberg!
Anonymous

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us” – Bill Watterson
Anonymous

Wouldn’t an advanced intelligence be subject to the same “rules” of evolutionary psychology as humans? IF you could solve complicated engineering problems involved in long distance space travel wouldn’t the maintenance of your home planet be a piece of cake? Scientific progress needs a relatively liberal political environment. Dictatorships in the twentieth century didn’t last long compared to those existing in past centuries. Little green anarchists maybe?????
dculberson

Maybe all the radio noise out there is because of the limitless other civilizations, all broadcasting their re-runs of I Love Rael.
reznicek111

What flashed through my mind was a bizarro Muppets sketch called “Queefs in Spaaaaaace.”

Not pretty.
nanuq

“Imagine if they receive transmissions of “Jersey Shore”. They might deem it universally responsible to destroy our planet. Yikes!”

We’re safe as long as they keep getting episodes of “Single Female Lawyer”.
scionofgrace

Like any species that advances as far as we have wouldn’t be at least as weird.
Anonymous

Deliberate messages sent out by powerful instruments like the ones listed may be the only things extra-terrestrial life may ever receive. It used to be believed that our radio waves, beamed out to space and could be received far far away, and they would hear the 1932 Olypmics or whatever.

I read an article recently that discounted this, saying that space and time distort the radio waves. By the time they reach something ‘intelligent’ it may just be cosmic debris.

Perhaps the same could be said of the more powerful attempts listed here.
Chuck

>If alien life exists, we have probably weirded it out by now

We’ll eventually travel to planets orbiting neighboring stars, and discover cities completely abandoned, the people who built these civilizations nowhere to be seen. And we’ll conclude that they all, long ago, committed to fleeing outward, away from us — a supernova-like pattern of evacuation, with us being the expanding bubble of pursuit. Our battle cry: “Will you be my friend?”
- querent
  
  That will heretofore by my battle cry. I so swear.
  
  “Now to catch the end of a thousand year old Leno monologue.” You guys know it’s slated for another season, right?
- Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  Earthlings: Kind of like Pepe Le Pew.
Church

“It is unclear what sort of reply we should expect.”

I’d be listening for a distinctive “Schwing!”
ian_b

@Chuck “they all, long ago, committed to fleeing outward, away from us”

Ah yes, much like white flight, our galaxy will have the “grey away”, and all of the aliens will move to gated solar systems.