The Strangest Attempts Ever At Communicating With Extraterrestrials

“I Come In Peace…  To Tell You To Stop Sending Me Extraterrestrial Sexts”

A few weeks ago I finished one of my favorite books in years: “The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence” by Paul Davies — check out my fawning review to see how much I absolutely loved the book (foreshadowing: I loved this book).  The book is dedicated to one question: if the universe is teeming with life, why haven’t we heard from anyone yet?  This is an excellent question, but not what I’m going to address in this article.  Instead, I’m going to focus on a related topic: the strangest ways we’ve attempted to communicate with aliens.  For a reasoned scientific evaluation of the potential of SETI, I strongly encourage you to check out Davies’ book; if instead you’re looking to hear some batshit insanity, read on!

By now you ought to be familiar with some of the plain-vanilla ways we’ve attempted communication with aliens — you’ve got yer Pioneer Plaques, your Arecibo Messages, yer typical carefully-crafted “Greetings From Earth” radio signal kinda stuff.  But there have been other attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials.  Strange attempts.  Embarrassing attempts.  Gross attempts.  Read on, to hear about the ten strangest ways of communicating with E.T.

	a	It’s All About The Neutrinos, Baby!   Forget radio waves.  The cool kids are using neutrinos to communicate these days.  Sure, they’re a little hard to catch, but you no longer have to worry about whether that planet is in the way!
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		Back In My Day, It Was All About The Painted Tarps    What’s a radio wave?  Ah, you kids and your fancy interwebs…  In the old days, we communicated with aliens the hard way:  by rolling out giant tarps.  And by setting fire to things.  And if a few aliens died in the process, well that’s just how…  zzzz….
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		The Wow! Signal   This is probably the closest humanity has ever come to a real, honest-to-god signal from an alien civilization.  Good thing I wasn’t on hand when it was received, or this would be called the “Holy BALLS! Signal”
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		What Language Should We Use?  So you’ve made first contact.  A representative from an alien race is ready to talk.  What language do you use?  Don’t panic — as is often the case, some serious nerds are on the case, and have provided several options for you.
heeeeeeeeeeello
		Rock N’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution, but Alien Communication Might Be   OK, maybe direct communication with aliens is too hard.  Can we eavesdrop on aliens communicating with each other?  Maybe if we tune our radios just right, we’ll be able to pick up an alien radio station… Read on to find out why that might be harder than you’d first think.
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		IETI.ORG   There’s a chance that aliens might make first contact with us using means that will be…  anticlimactic.  Who’s to say we’ll be rewarded with a dramatically-lighted encounter on a mountaintop, after weeks of anticipation carved in the mashed potatoes?  What if instead, all we get is a mass email?
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		The San Marino Scale  Let’s say you’ve cobbled together a radio transmitter using an old microwave and some legos.  And you want to test it out by sending a few boudoir pics to a neighboring star system.  Before you fire up that baby, have you stopped to consider whether your dick-pic will be received by a hostile civilization?
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		Panspermia    You heading outside?  You’re gonna want an umbrella.  Yeah, I know it’s sunny out there, not a cloud in the sky.  But take one anyway.  In fact, take two.
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		Mmm, Doritos    We’ve sent a handful of messages into outer space, most of which are pretty boring, but a select few are pretty weird.  By far the most delicious of these messages is a freaking Doritos commercial.  Read on to find out why we sent a commercial for ranch-flavored salty chips into space.
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		The Arecibo Message   Probably the most famous message we’ve sent into space, this image was carefully crafted by none other than Carl Sagan, and was beamed to a nearby star cluster via radio telescope.  Nothing weird about that, right?  WRONG!!!  Read on to find out the astounding reason I’m including this otherwise well-known message in this article.
h ello
		Oh You Have To Be Kidding Me…    Of all the ideas I’ve written about on this site… of all the topics I’ve made fun of… out of millions of words written about thousands of weird topics over the last five decades of this website’s existence, this topic is simply the strangest.  If you read nothing else in this article, YOU HAVE TO READ THIS!!