Earth to Gliese 581d, anyone there?

Peter Dinham
Friday, 28 August 2009 10:25

Science - Space

The search for human life beyond mother earth is one of those endless pursuits that never ceases to fascinate and intrigue we earthlings. So far, however, there’s been a deathly silence from outerspace to all the signals sent so far, but that’s no deterrent to Australian website, Hello From Earth, which today sent off a new signal to a far off planet with text messages from 25,000 people from all over the world.

With the help of NASA and the CSIRO and their joint Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex at Tidbinbilla, Hello From Earth today transmitted a signal containing all of the 25,000 messages to a recently discovered planet, Gliese 581d, which is considered to harbour life.

The transmission was undertaken by Hello From Earth as part of Australia’s National Science Week and the International Year of Astronomy. Prior to today’s transmission from the Tidbinbilla complex, messages sent from around the world were collected on the Hello from Earth website, exported as a text file and sent to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California earlier this week, where it was encoded, packaged and tested.
 
The Hello From Earth website was established by COSMOS magazine and designed and built by Australian IT services provider, eNerds, who also developed and implemented the backend database technology used to collect and store messages.

eNerds’ managing director, Jamie Warner, said today the company was “pleased to be part of Hello From Earth and to have provided the IT infrastructure to facilitate communication with a planet outside our solar system.”

Mind you, getting a message to Gliese 581d, let alone getting a timely response, or indeed any response at all, requires a hell of a lot of patience, despite Gliese being the closest planet to earth which we’re told can potentially harbour life.

CONTINUED page 2