Tom Chivers

How to message a Martian

Many methods have been proposed. But Daniel Oberhaus reckons, in all seriousness, that contacting extraterrestrials may prove too expensive

issue 09 November 2019

Apparently the first audio message broadcast into space with the ostensible purpose of communicating with aliens was the sound of vaginal contractions in ballerinas. According to Daniel Oberhaus’s Extraterrestrial Languages, the artist Joe Davis beamed the information from an MIT radar installation towards the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1985.

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