Music is an ideal medium for interstellar communication. From a report: Each summer for the past 25 years, tens of thousands of people have flocked to Barcelona, Spain, to witness Sonar, a three-day festival dedicated to electronic music, art, and design. To celebrate Sonar’s 25th anniversary in 2018, the festival partnered with the Catalonia Institute for Space Studies and the nonprofit METI International to send a series of interstellar messages to Luyten’s star, a red dwarf about 12 light-years from Earth. Although red dwarfs are the most common stellar objects in our galaxy, Luyten’s star is remarkable for hosting GJ237b, the closest potentially habitable planet outside of our own solar system. No one knows for sure whether GJ237b hosts life, intelligent or otherwise, but if ET does call the planet home, Sonar wants to rock its socks off. Over the course of several nights in late 2017 and early 2018, a radar system in Tromso, Norway, blasted a custom message from Sonar toward GJ237b. Like any good correspondence, the message began with a greeting: In this case, the first 33 prime numbers repeated on two alternating radio frequencies functioned as a stand-in for “hello.”
This was followed by a brief tutorial that the message designers hoped would teach ET to extract the music written by Sonar-affiliated musicians and embedded in the message. […] The Sonar messages are unique insofar as they are the only interstellar transmissions to use songs designed by musicians specifically for communicating with ET. That the messages include a substantial information content places them firmly in the tradition of messaging extraterrestrial intelligences, or METI, a term coined by the Russian radio astronomer Alexander Zaitsev to differentiate the practice from other modes of interstellar communication. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is focused on listening for ET signals rather than sending them, and “active SETI” is about creating beacons that lack information but signal to alien intelligences that we exist.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot