‘Hello From Earth’: The Unlikely Story of an Interstellar Message
A powerful beacon sent to an Earth-like planet will arrive in 2030. This is the improbable story behind Australia’s first attempt to contact an extraterrestrial civilisation.
IMAGINE YOU could send a text message to an Earth-like planet far away, a planet that could well be home to an alien civilisation. What would you say?
That’s exactly the question people faced a decade ago. In an Australian project called HELLO FROM EARTH, almost 26,000 people wrote a 160-character message that was sent to Gliese 581d, an Earth-like planet 20 light-years away. That powerful transmission, sent by NASA, has now passed the halfway mark on its long, lonely journey through the silent cosmos.
And it began in a café in inner Sydney in May 2009. It was the International Year of Astronomy and Simon France, then head of the Australian Government’s National Science Week initiative, was looking for ideas for an event that would spark national interest in astronomy later in August of that year. I was editor-in-chief of Cosmos magazine, and France was discussing ideas over lunch with me and publisher Kylie Ahern.
