Lone Signal crowdfunding crowdsourced communication with aliens
Humans will soon be able to send directed messages to extraterrestrials who might be listening for signals originating from Earth.
On June 18, the Lone Signal initiative will launch. This initiative, lead by Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra and his team of scientists and entrepreneurs, will reportedly be “the world’s only messaging platform and social community for interstellar communication.” The people behind this initiative believe that “crowd sourcing messaging to intelligent life (METI) is the ideal approach to establishing a stable, cohesive, and well-resourced interstellar beacon on Earth.” Lone Signal explains:
Launching in June 2013, Lone Signal’s unfettered access to the broadcasting capacity of Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel, CA allows them to target the closest known stars suspected to harbor potentially habitable planets orbiting in their circumstellar habitable zones – otherwise referred to as “Goldilocks zones”. Through our website, users are given the opportunity to upload and transmit content to these targets (e.g., texts, images, and, ultimately, audio and video). Lone Signal is the first continuous, collective, and cohesive METI experiment of its kind.
Lone Signal held a press event on Tuesday, June 11 at which co-founder Pierre Fabre stated, “Our scientific goals are to discover sentient beings outside of our solar system.” According to Universe Today, Lone Signal messages will be targeted at the potentially habitable Gliese 526 system.
Although people will be limited to one message, additional messages can be purchased for a small fee. And those fees will help support the Lone Signal initiative. Lone Signal CEO Jamie King explains, “In effect we are doing our own Kickstarter and doing the crowdfunding on our own . . . Lone Signal would not be possible without crowd sourcing support, which will be used for maintaining the millions of dollars in equipment, powering the dish, running the web portal and other critical tech that makes the project possible.”
People around the world will be able to submit that one free message to extraterrestrials via the Lone Signal website beginning June 18. But interested messengers are invited to sign up on the website now.