Crowd-Funded Radio Beacon Will Message Aliens

astroengine writes "In the hope of uniting people around the globe in a long-duration project to send a radio 'message in a bottle' METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) signal, a crowd-funded project utilizing a refurbished radio telescope in California has begun its work. Lone Signal is a project initiated by scientists, businessmen and entrepreneurs to set up a continuous radio beacon from Earth. To support the operations of the Jamesburg Earth Station radio dish in Carmel Valley, Calif. (a dish built to support the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969), a crowd-funding effort has been set up so that for a small fee, users can send images to the stars. If you're content with sending a text message, your first message is free. The radio dish's first target is Gliese 526, a red dwarf star 18 light-years from Earth, but the project will be considering other stellar targets believed to be harboring habitable worlds."

Comments

Re:We should stop this

[0111 1110]

Those radio broadcasts are unlikely to even make it to Alpha Centauri with reasonable sized recieving antennas. With planetary scale antennas it might be possible. The military radars are another story, but they would be randomly aimed and relatively infrequent and not transmitting any sort of coherent message.

This wouldn't be the first attempt at METI. Alexander Zaitsev has sent a number of messages to various stars including Gliese 581 using his 70 meter RT-70 radiotescope located in Yevpatoria, Ukraine. He is the chief advocate for METI among professional astronomers and makes his case well I think.

His messages were relatively brief however and are unlikely to be noticed even if there is an intelligent civ at one of his chosen targets. What would new is the idea of a full time, dedicated transmitter sending messages out 24/7/365 aimed for long periods, like say 6-12 months, at a single target so that if anyone is there listening there would be at least some chance of them noticing our signal.