Philip Lubin, professor of astrophysics and cosmology at UC Santa Barbara, and graduate student Travis Brashears believe that to successfully establish contact with intelligent alien species, humans must turn our planet into an interstellar flashlight.
Those who donate to the project will have the option of placing data in space. For small money, a contributor can buy enough space for a fiery tweet, but, if more moolah is thrown down, one could conceivably upload movies, novels, music, or even a personal DNA sequence — a 90-gigabyte proposition.
Brashears hopes to get these wafer sets on board of every rocket leaving Earth.
The physicist, however, is keen on his major goal, the $100,000 construction of a high-powered laser somewhere on Earth to send light-based messages from humanity into space.
Sending out coded messages at the speed of light, in all directions, is the best way to announce ourselves to our neighboring universe, Lubin and Brashears claim.
"The packet of photons could contain your unique DNA sequence, sent out forever into the universe as ones and zeros, just like computer code," Lubin said, cited by Wired.
You are free to donate, but think twice when you choose what information you want to share with extraterrestrial intelligences. It would be an ultimate irony if some civilization chose to annihilate Earth based on the sound of its current pop music.
Or an even worse scenario was posited.
"Say some alien species picks up [a person's] DNA sequence, then we get invaded by a clone army of [that person]," Lubin said.
