Facebook painted 42-foot by 42-foot QR code on top of its Menlo Park office that’s apparently visible from space. From a Beatles broadcast to Doritos’s galactic campaign, the best attempts to track down ET.
Throughout history, mankind has been devising ways to send messages skyward. Now Facebook is getting into the act, painting a 42-foot by 42-foot QR code on top of its Menlo Park, Calif., office that’s apparently visible from space. From mirrors to radio messages, The Daily Beast runs down the different ways people have tried to contact aliens over the years.
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In the 1820s, German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss began talking about reflecting sunlight with the heliotrope, a mirrored device that reflects sunlight often used in land surveying. The idea was to harness light to catch the attention of those in outer space. Gauss came up with an idea to mow down a huge triangle in the Siberian taiga as a signal to aliens and to plant wheat so there was a size and color contrast visible from the moon.
Four decades after Gauss, a French inventor tried something similar. Charles Cros, who was also a poet, employed a parabolic mirror. Cros used the mirror to shine the light emitted from electric lamps into the atmosphere. The system could be used to flash the lights on and off, creating a code.
Light shining up into space is just one way to try to contact alien life forms. In 1974, scientists got a little more sophisticated, emitting radio waves. The first SETI, or Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, signal was transmitted using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
Tomas va Houtryve / AP Photo
NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 are both equipped with a time capsule, in case the spacecraft run into any little green men out there. The capsule includes a gold-plated phonograph record that has more than 100 images, music from a variety of eras, and examples of 55 languages.
NASA / AP Photo
In 2008, NASA decided to share the Fab Four with extraterrestrials. The agency broadcast the Beatles tune “Across the Universe” in honor of its 50th anniversary. (It also happened to be the song’s 40th anniversary.) The song was beamed from the agency’s 70-meter antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert, in California. Scientists aimed the song, which traveled at a rate of 186,000 miles per second, at the North Star, a mere 431 light years away from Earth.
NASA / AP Photo
If aliens do ever come to Earth, Doritos has a leg up with the advertising. In what is most likely the first galactic ad campaign ever, the company recently announced a contest asking the public in Britain to create a 30-second ad targeted at ETs. The winner’s entry will be transmitted from a high-frequency radar telescope in Svalbard, Norway, in June. (It’ll most likely be aimed at Ursa Major.) It’s probably the world’s first interstellar advertising.
Roger Eritja / Getty Images
Social networking site Bebo has been trying to contact alien life since 2008. The company’s A Message From Earth has traveled more than 20 trillion miles in search of interstellar neighbors. The message is a combination of photos and videos designed to demonstrate what life on Earth is like. Broadcast from Ukraine’s national space agency, it’s expected to reach Gliese 581, its target planet, by 2028.
