The “WOW” signal was discovered in 1977 and we are going to finally answer back, via Twitter. Now is the time for you to send your 140 character message to “Aliens”. All tweets posted between 8 p.m. EDT Friday ,June 29 and 3 a.m. EDT Saturday ,June 30 tagged with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be sent off into space.
Exactly 35 years , August 15th 2012, after the signal was first discovered we will be sending back a signal with the help of National Geographics new show, “Chasing UFOs”. This is clearly a publicity stunt for the new show, but it’s still a cool concept.
They are working with Arecibo Observatory to develop encryption for the transmission which will most likely be a binary code made up of 1′s and 0′s.
The message will be sent towards the Sagittarius Constellation. The distance to Sagitarrius is 78,000 light years away. It takes around 10-20 minutes to send data to Mars which is 0.00000076051 light years from Earth. If my math is correct it would take 102562753941.434 times as long to reach Sagittarius. It will be a long time before we hear anything back.
After 35 years the WOW signal is still a mystery to scientists that have studied it, not knowing where exactly it came from or what created the signal. Scientists say that the signal was sent from a 2.2 gigawatt transmitter, much more powerful than anything we have.
Start thinking of things to tell the aliens, though this is a huge shot in the dark, you never know what might happen.
Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Yea, lets put all of our trust in the people that use twitter to make first contact with extraterrestrial life.
I’m sure we will have some really “interesting” messages for “ET”
if it takes 20 minutes to send data to mars, then for the data to reach sagitarrius, it would take nearly 3902692 years…by that time, mankind would have become extinct…some other species of life may be existing…lol