Exhibit A:
Over a six-hour period this morning, high-powered radars in the Arctic Circle broadcast an advertisement into space for the first time.
The advertisement, for Doritos tortilla chips, was being directed towards a solar system in the Ursa Major constellation, just 42 light years from Earth. The solar system contains a habitable zone, and could host an Earth-like planet and extraterrestrial life.
Exhibit B:
The advert itself is unlikely to be decoded by extraterrestrial life, according to van Eyken. “We’re sending it as an MPEG file coded into 1s and 0s. It’s going to look pretty random,” he says. But repeating the message in a series of regular pulses over several hours should help extraterrestrials identify the message as intelligent, he thinks. (emphasis added)
It’s really just semantics, but I would prefer not to think of an ad for Doritos as intelligent.
(via Warren Ellis)