Earth Calling

During the month of August, 2009 a total of 25,880 messages were collected from the public by the Australian Cosmos magazine website in an initiative to celebrate Australia's National Science Week and the International Year of Astronomy. Supported by NASA, the CSIRO, and the Australia's Science Minister, it was a way of making people aware of the role science plays in our society. The messages were collected by the project then converted into binary code and beamed into space at noon on Friday August 28, by the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla.

It was reported that the signal was equivalent to using the combined transmission power of 300 billion mobile phones. It took two hours to send the transmission but it will take two decades before it reaches it’s destination around December 2029. While it’s no news flash for the UFO community that life exists elsewhere besides planet Earth it is extremely important to observe that no less than 1000 newspapers in different languages reported the initiative and more than 9,917 blogs around the world discussed it and linked to the site. Cosmos magazine reported that Visitors to the site reached 254,620 in the 13 days the site collected messages, and visitors read 1.25 million pages, from messages left by participants to articles on exoplanets and astrobiology.

Putting aside for the moment that this was a HUGE publicity stunt by the editor to prop up flagging magazine subscriptions (did we say that out loud?), the exercise demonstrates the clear and overwhelming interest by members of our population in communicating with life outside this planet. This is probably not what the cover-up merchants want to read but hey, too bad. If ET is listening, now would be the time to step up any initiatives to strike up a conversation with the common earthman in the street. Will we get a response from ET? Scientists believe they will have to wait decades to find out but we already know the answer, don’t we.

This is our favourite message from the hopeful future: We come in peace. If you are out there, please respond. We want to be friends. We are all different and we can't wait to meet you! From the children of Earth. Class 4M, Castle Cove Public School, Australia