As if one bunch of tweets headed to space wasn’t enough, National Geographic is going out of this world as well.
After learning about a project called Tweets in Space, National Geographic got in touch with the team behind that project to collaborate on a new event.
The Tweets in Space team, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, plan to transmit tweets bearing the #tweetsinspace hashtag to GJ667Cc, a planet around 164 trillion miles away which has the potential to support life.
National Geographic is planning a similar transmission next week. It partnered with Kildall and Stern to licence the pair’s custom Twitter software. Sure, National Geographic’s project is largely to promote new show Chasing UFOs, but there’s actually a scientific purpose behind it as well.
Any tweets tagged #ChasingUFOs that are sent in the seven hours after 8pm ET on June 29 will be rolled into National Geographic’s transmission. The nonprofit is sending the tweets in response to the Wow! Signal, a 72-second transmission from space picked up by Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in 1977. National Geographic is also sending several video messages from filmmakers, musicians and scientists among others.
The tweets and videos will be beamed into space on August 15, exactly 35 years after SETI received the Wow! Signal, from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Meanwhile, Kildall and Stern are looking for a little more funding for their own Twitter transmission, scheduled for September. They now hope to raise another $2500 through their Rockethub project by Monday, with licensing fees from National Geographic helping to make their live performance possible.
If you’ve ever wanted to tell an alien what you had for lunch, what you thought of a new movie, or your jokes about a celebrity, here’s your chance.
Photo via YouTube
