Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
RECENT POSTS
- Mars Rover: Stuck in the Mud
- Tranquility Base
- NASA's Ares 1-X Test: The View From Above
- The Yes Men
- The Missing Link -- Not
- Moon Crash Kicked Up Plume After All
- Moon Crash: Where's the Water?
- Green Apple: Firm is Latest to Leave U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- Recovery.gov: Your Tax Dollars at Work
- Climate: Power Companies Quit U.S Chamber of Commerce
MONTHLY ARCHIVES
« Previous | Main | Next »
'Across the Universe'
February 01, 2008 2:43 PM
"Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world...."
That's from the Beatles' "Across the Universe." Monday, 40 years after they recorded it, NASA will send it...across the universe.
It's part publicity stunt, part nostalgia, part anniversary celebration. The space agency tries hard to reach people who wouldn't otherwise be interested in space. NASA claims it's also taking the moment to celebrate its own fiftieth anniversary, the fiftieth anniversary (yesterday) of the first American satellite, and the 45th anniversary of the Deep Space Network, which it uses to communicate with interplanetary probes.
At 7 p.m., EST Monday (midnight, Greenwich Mean Time), one of the great dish antennae near Madrid, Spain, will transmit an mp3 file of the song in the direction of Polaris, the North Star. Traveling at the speed of light, the signal will take 431 years to get there.
"Send my love to the aliens," said Sir Paul McCartney in a statement released by NASA. "All the best, Paul."
You can find all sorts of versions of the song, authorized or otherwise. There's a YouTube video HERE, a Wikipedia article HERE, and so on.
It may seem a bit un-technological, or lowbrow, or something, for NASA to give even the little time it's given to this little project. And yet...and yet....
If there were intelligent beings on a planet orbiting another star, and they had technology similar to ours, and they looked in our direction, they would miss us. They would see the Sun, a pretty average yellow star, with perhaps one or two planets, Jupiter and maybe Saturn. Earth, less than eight thousand miles in diameter, would be too small to show up.
They would not pick up our television broadcasts either; we don't transmit in ways that get very far. It's an urban legend -- a terrific one, but a legend -- that the first thing aliens will see of us is a rerun of "I Love Lucy."
But here's a transmission that stands a chance of traveling, not across the universe, but at least across a part of space. The odds are low that any beings out there will detect it -- they don't call it space for nothing -- it still....
Will someone out there have radio like ours? Will they be able to decipher the signal? What might they think? Is this how we on this little blue planet want to be known?
"Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world...."
Of course, back in 1972, NASA launched Pioneer 10 to fly past Jupiter and on out of the Solar System, and on it was that famous plaque of a man and a woman, both nude, with encoded information on where to find the ship's makers. It provoked a parody: a drawing of a man and a woman, both well-dressed, holding the plaque next to the crashed spacecraft and saying, "The people on Earth appear to be the same as we are on Jupiter, except that they don't wear any clothes."
February 1, 2008 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (23)
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
What a lovely tribute as well to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who died yesterday. The "Jai Guru Deva" in Across the Universe is a tribute to Maharishi's teacher. "Don't fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear," Maharishi said in a 2006 interview, repeating one of his own mantras. Isn't that lovely?
Posted by: Lisa | Feb 6, 2008 5:30:57 AM
We all have complaints about how the US
spends it's tax dollars. And some don't
LOVE the Beatles or NASA as much as I do. But that OK. The Beatles had a message of LOVE and NASA is about exploring the Universe and developing new technologies. MNEEDES, how do you feel about wasting 1 TRILLION dollars on a totally unnecessary WAR.
Posted by: blackie | Feb 15, 2008 1:28:35 PM
Okay, enough of this hand wringing. The more interesting question to me is, what does the song look like in binary code? Where can I see that converted?
Anybody know how to do that?
Thanks,
Bratty
Posted by: Yvette Davis | Jul 23, 2008 1:27:15 AM
Post a comment
