nasa says hello universe meet beatles

NASA says: Hello Universe. Meet the Beatles

If you're out there in deep space, you'll want to be tuning in at 7

p.m. Eastern time on Monday, Feb. 4 (plus however long it takes

electromagnetic radiation to reach you from Earth doing the

186,000-miles-a-second speed limit).

A NASA antenna at Fort Irwin, Calif. (NASA photo)

That's when NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first

space mission -- the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite -- by using

the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals

from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles' song "Across the

Universe," which as it happens was mostly recorded exactly 40 years

earlier, on Feb. 4, 1968.

Reception will be best in the general direction of Polaris, 431

lightyears away, which is where NASA is aiming the signal. (That would

be the North Star to us laymen.) But it ought to be audible in plenty

of places on Earth as well, at least by imitation: NASA is encouraging

space fans and Beatle fans alike to play the song themselves at the

same time.

NASA's press release includes some perfectly in-character comments

from Sir Paul McCartney ("Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to

the aliens. All the best, Paul.") and from Yoko Ono, widow of John

Lennon, the song's main author ("I see that this is the beginning of

the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets

across the universe."). Presumably, Julie Taymor will be pleased as

well; her film "Across the Universe," built around a soundtrack of

Beatle songs, is still in theaters and contending for an Oscar; it is

due for release on DVD on Tuesday.

The event also commemorates the 45th anniversary of the creation of

the antenna system, the Deep Space Network, which NASA uses to explore

space at one remove by listening to the electromagnetic radiation

coming our way from Out There; the system also comes in handy for

picking up data sent by space probes we have dispatched to the planets

and beyond over the years.

NASA doesn't often send outgoing mail this way; the last high-profile

American broadcast meant specifically for extraterrestrial ears was

also the first, dispatched by Professor Frank Drake of Cornell

University in 1974 during the dedication of the upgraded Arecibo

radiotelescope in Puerto Rico. (No reply, at least so far.) But Seth

Shostak of the SETI Institute, which has been looking for signs of

life beyond Earth since 1984, noted in an e-mail message to our

colleague Dennis Overbye today that other groups in Ukraine and Canada

have been sending signals in recent years.

Of course, vast amounts of electromagnetic signals flood out from the

Earth every day as a side effect of ordinary human-to-human activity,

from TV and radio broadcasts, radar stations, satellite uplinks and

other sources, and the leading wave of that stuff has an eight-decade

head start.

"Proof of our existence is already out there," Dr. Shostak noted,

"that's simply a fact."

An array of antennas that could pick up terrestrial TV signals in a

distant solar system wouldn't be hard to build, he observed. But

there's still plenty of time for any potential alien listener to

tie-dye some T-shirts and stock the fridge before settling in to enjoy

the song. Though scientists have found evidence of some 270 planets of

other stars, most are extremely unlikely to support life, and all but

a handful are far enough away that no readily detected,

human-generated signal could yet have reached them.

"It's safe to say that nobody knows of the existence of Homo sapiens

(beyond this planet, of course)," Dr. Shostak observed.

A pity. The Lede was hoping for a little intergalactic help grokking

that bit of Sanskrit in the chorus, "Jai guru deva om."