In the year 2030, a powerful radio transmission originating from Earth will arrive at a potentially habitable exoplanet located approximately 12.4 light years away. Should any alien intelligence be there to receive it, they’re in for quite a treat: This binary stream of data contains short musical clips from some of the world’s best electronic musicians. It’s part art, part science—but considering we know virtually nothing about extraterrestrials, should we really be calling attention to ourselves?
For three days in October, organizers of the Spanish Sónar electronic music festival pointed the 105-foot-wide European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT) radio antenna towards the sky and sent bursts of radio signals towards GJ 273—a red dwarf star (sometimes called Luyten’s Star) that hosts two known planets, one of which, GJ 273b, may be capable of supporting life. With the help of astronomers from METI (Messages to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and the Institute of Space Studies of Cataloniar (IEEC), the Sónar team beamed digitally encoded clips of music from such artists as Autechre, Holly Herndon, Jean-Michel Jarre, Modeselektor, Matmos, Kode9, and Laurel Halo.
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