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This may not exactly be on the topic of mobile communication unless you assume that “mobile” doesn’t just pertain to Earth. It seems that, for some reason, Australian Science Minister Kim Carr has decided to test just how much Roaming he can do on his current data plan and send an SMS to the planet Gliese 581d. Situated at a distance of 20 light years, or 194 trillion kilometres, from Earth it is the closest planet we have discovered that could support life, or as Bones McCoy would say, “Life as we know it…”

According to The Australian…

The message, to be sent from Canberra’s Questacon to mark National Science Week, will say: “Hello from Australia on the planet we call Earth. These messages express our people’s dreams for the future. We want to share those dreams with you.”

If there are aliens out there, they will need a dish to receive the message, which will not arrive before 2029.

It is believed to be the first attempt to make contact with the planet, which astronomers believe could hold abundant liquid water, necessary for supporting life. The planet, whose “years” last just 66.8 days, was discovered in 2007.

Australians will also be able to send Twitter-like messages to the planet via www.hellofromearth.net.

Am I alone in thinking this is a VERY bad idea? How do we know that message actually means something nice in the alien’s language. For all we know it could be translated into Alien as “Gliese 581d. is a stoopid name for a planet…you wanna make something of it?”

Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, just yet another junk SMS which would effectively say to the aliens “Hello, we are here, and probably quite tasty.”

And what do we do if they text us BACK? Just think of the service changes….bad idea all around. We should have just sent flowers and a nice card.

Zealot (471 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

By day a department manager and writer for a major network device vendor...by night Zealot stalks the mean magnetic streets, striking fear into the hearts of bandwidth abusers and theme park mascots. Zealot has been involved with mobile devices for more than a decade now, starting off with dumb phones, moving to PDAs and then to smartphones, notebooks and netbooks with the odd PMP thrown in. Most of his mobile time currently is spent on a Treo Pro, Zune HD, Thinkpad T61, Gigabyte M912M or a Hackintoshed Compaq Mini 704. He proudly groks the Geek community and considers himself a Neo Maxi Zune Dweebie (thanks Will Wheaton!).