Skip to main content

Astronomers plan to beam Earth’s greatest hits into deep space, and you can help

Earthling Trailer

If you could send a message to a potential alien civilization, what would it sound like? It’s worth thinking about, as a new project from the SETI Institute (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) will give the public the chance to submit musical compositions to be beamed into space.

Announced at the SXSW conference, the Earthling Project’s aim is “connecting humans around the world through the universal language of music.” It will build a database of music from around the world to represent humanity and build bridges across cultures and geography.

There will be four phases to the project:

  • Phase 1 is a call for vocal submissions, collecting songs about birth (like lullabies and songs of springtime), about life (celebration songs, spiritual songs, and so on), and about death (funeral songs or mourning songs).
  • Phase 2 is a seven-part musical composition called “Earthling” which will bring together world voices, sounds from space, electronic synthesizer samples, and a live ensemble. The composition will be performed at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Northern California by prominent musicians and will be broadcast live.
  • Phase 3 is the call for musical submissions, where musicians can use samples from the Earthling audio database to create a series of albums which have been “collectively composed.”
  • Phase 4 will be the launch of a digital music-making app which allows users on computers and tablets to compose music using material from the database and submit it to the project.

Once all the phases are complete, a selection of the resulting compositions and sample elements will be sent into space by SETI, on behalf of Earthlings everywhere.

The project is headed by composer and musician Felipe Pérez Santiago and astronomer Jill Tarter, as part of SETI’s Artist-In-Residence Program where artists are invited to become creative ambassadors for the institute. Previous programs have included an audio, light, sculpture, and video installation about the language of humpback whales and a group show called “Making Contact,” which featured sculpture and mixed-media works about exploration of the moon and about the origins of the universe.

The call for vocal submissions for the Earthling project will go live this year, and you can sign up to be notified if you would like to take part.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more