ALIEN EXPEDITION? Lexington, Kentucky beams tourism campaign to outer space

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A Kentucky city’s out-of-this-world tourism campaign is not expected to be seen nor heard for nearly four decades.

And the message may not even reach its target audience.

But that didn’t stop the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau and a team of local scientists and scholars from launching an ad campaign to attract alien life forms to the city of 300,000.

The tourism bureau put together a travel package about the city including black-and-white photos of the state’s bluegrass hills, songs by a local blues musician and bitmap illustrations of humans and horses. They beamed up their message using lasers in the fall.

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They concentrated their efforts on an area of space approximately 40 light years away called TRAPPIST-1. Astrobiologists believe the seven planets orbiting a small red star in the area are potentially conducive to life.

“Many previous transmissions have employed the language of mathematics for communication, and our team did, too,” Robert Lodder, a University of Kentucky professor and a champion for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, told Popular Science.

“But we decided that extraterrestrials might be more interested in things unique to planet Earth than universal truths like mathematics, so if we seek to attract visitors, it would be best to send something interesting and uniquely Earth.”

Assuming the aliens are able to decode the message and immediately begin their 378-million-kilometre journey to Earth, the earliest year of arrival would be 2103. That estimation is based on the approximately 40 light years it would take for the message to reach TRAPPIST-1 and the 40 light years it would take for the extraterrestrial beings arrive, if they have that technology.

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Lodder believes some parts of the message will be able to reach TRAPPIST-1, but said it would be difficult to know if the space creatures are able to decode what is received.

“The alien receiving technology could be worse than ours, or much better,” Lodder said.

However, Jan McGarry of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and her retired colleague John Degnan say the message sent to outer space using a laser is unlikely to survive the long distance.

“The distance to the nearest star is two light years away or many orders of magnitude farther than the edge of our solar system (Pluto). Since the strength of a laser communications link is proportional to 1 divided by the distance squared, it is highly unlikely that a laser system would be able to transfer any meaningful amount of information over that distance let alone one 20 times farther away where the signal would be 400 times smaller.”