When the Voyager 2 space probe was launched in 1977 containing depictions of the human race, precise directions to Earth, and a golden record with lots and lots of audio recordings of our culture, environment, and even our basic human biology, there were some folks who thought that this was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Why would we want to communicate and share our home address with aliens if we didn’t know whether they’d be friendly or not?
Those folks must really be freaking out now that we’re going to take hundreds of tweets and beam them precisely towards GJ667CC, a possibly life-supporting planet.
Artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall created the hashtag #tweetsinspace and collected all the tweets tagged with it over a certain publicized half hour period. Now they’re going through all of them and preparing for GJ667CC to come round to a better view of the Earth before sending them off.
From the Daily Dot:
Stern and Kildall had indicated they would not include any tweets that used hate speech in the transmission… While they’re still trawling through all the tweets, they have not yet found any that will be excluded.
Some analysis run on the tweets sent by the community during the performance period revealed that outside of the terms “tweet,” “space,” and articles like “the” and “an,” the two most commonly used words were “please” and “love.”
“Hello,” “here,” “help,” and “peace” were among the other most popular words used, suggesting a deep yearning to make contact with aliens and understand more about their cultures.
…internet, you do surprise me sometimes. Lets just hope the aliens understand emoticons.
(via The Daily Dot.)
