If you lived in outer space you have to wonder what those whackos on Earth are doing. In June, British scientists plan to be the first to broadcast advertising into outer space for all space creatures to endure. You may recall that last month NASA beamed a song - The Beatles' "Across the Universe" - directly into deep space.
Today, the British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos ‘You Make It, We Play It' user-generated-content competition. The winning advertisement will be beamed into the outer space, to anyone 'out there' that may be watching according to a statement from the University of Leicester.
The project is also being sponsored by The European Incoherent SCATter Scientific Association (EISCAT), which studies solar-planetary interactions and a series of radar systems. In fact it is on June12th, the space-bound ad will be broadcast from a 500MHz Ultra High Frequency Radar from the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard.
The transmission is being directed at a solar system 42 light years away from Earth with planets that orbit its star '47 Ursae Majoris'. 47 UMa is located in the Great Bear Constellation (also known as "The Plough"). It is very similar to the Sun and is believed to host a habitable zone that could potentially harbor small terrestrial planets and support life as we know it, the group stated.
The advertisement blast will travel at the speed of light and continue for an indefinite period, the group said. Within 1.2 seconds the transmission will pass our moon, after 4.5 minutes it will pass Mars, in under 9 minutes the signal will whiz past the Sun and five and a half hours later it will travel past Pluto and out of our solar system. The effective power of the transmitted signal to the Universe will be around two thousand million watts, ensuring the advert could be received and watched hundreds of light years from Earth, the group said.
The ad will be coded in '1's and '0's represented by phase changes of the transmitted signal. The message will be broken into sections and each of the pulses will be numbered so that any intelligent life on recipient planets can mathematically reassemble them. This lets scientists send a signal that is both powerful and easy to recover, even when weakened by the great distance to its planned destination, the group said.
Now if they want Doritos, how are they expected to get them?
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