Friday night, Twitter destroys the Earth
By Alexandra Petri

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in tweets. (KIMIHIRO HOSHINO – AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Well, humans, it’s been nice knowing you.

If you have not heard, from 10:30 to 11 PM ET Friday night, theTweets in Space project is capturing all tweets with the hashtag “#tweetsinspace” in order to send them, via a Florida transmitter, into the Vast Beyond. Tweets to space? There goes our welcome in the universe.

The transmitter is, admittedly, weak. As Seth Shostak told Wired Science, the aliens on the Potentially Habitable Planet at which they’re aiming the signal would have to have “a radio receiver the size of Nebraska.” It would be just our luck if the aliens are the kind of bizarre radio hobbyists who have decided that this is exactly what they need.

And I hope they aren’t.

Because otherwise, we are not long for this world.

Don’t get me wrong: I love Twitter. It enables me to inflict my quotidian musings on dozens of people I’ve never met!

But imagine the responses of Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life on first receiving these messages.

The first few minutes would be joy and excitement. “Intelligent life!” they would mutter to themselves, gathering around the Nebraska-shaped receiver. “Gee, they sure love puns!”

A few minutes later, fatigue would set in. “Gee, they sure love puns,” someone else would say. A hush would ensue.

“That’s more information than I really wanted about that,” someone else would say.

Several tweets consisting only of “RT This if you believe in BIEBER!!!!! #tweetsinspace” “Send One Direction to Exoplanet GJ667Cc!” would come flying through.

“Please don’t,” the extraterrestrials would murmur, summoning a Death Star to our neighborhood.

A few minutes of Twitter are bearable. But half an hour of it, as your first taste of humanity? The mind boggles.

But there’s still time. There is a decent crowd of scientists who maintain that getting in touch with space aliens is not a good idea. Don’t call them, they say. Wait for them to call you. Of course, as Stephen Hawking has noted, any aliens getting into touch with us would probably be a bad sign. Generally, when one group of individuals has massive technological capabilities and the other produces little of interest besides parodies of “Call Me Maybe” and “Gangnam Style,” it goes badly for the second group. Just ask the ancient Mayans, known for their parody video craftsmanship. We can still stop this.

In “War of the Worlds,” the Martians did the most dreadful things that they could think of. They trampled the earth, setting fire to our vegetation. They made hideous noises. They even sank the Thunderchild.

But they had the basic humanity (martianity?) not to subject us to a full half-hour of barely filtered Twitter.

I don’t want our first impression in space to be a bunch of people making limp puns about Mitt Romney’s tax returns. It seems wrong. It is this sort of nagging consideration that makes me unwelcome at parties. I know the intent is to send a message. In this case the message is, “Nope, there isn’t intelligent life in our corner of the universe.”

Right now, Twitter is a mildly irritating terrestrial cross to bear.

But let it slip the surly bonds of Earth and — I shudder to think what will happen. Although the one advantage of this is that the data will take, at best, 22 years to get there, meaning that it will be 44 years from today before we know the extent of the damage. So go out and live your life. And get off Twitter. It may be our only hope.

Your tweets, beamed across the universe
by Shweta Sharma

It was Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sci-fi movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that acquainted most of us with life beyond earth. Closer home, it was Rakesh Roshan’s Koi Mil Gaya (2003). Experimenting on the possibilities of alien existence, NASA scientists have tried to discover planets in the ‘habitable’ zone. Succeeding in finding over 2,000 exoplanets (a planet outside the solar system), all of which are ‘not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life’ — raised possibilities of ET or Jadoo’s existence.

Taking cues from such discoveries and combining it with the proliferation of Twitter on Earth, two performance artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall have conceptualised Tweets in Space, a networked-performance event that beams Twitter messages to a nearby exoplanet that might support human-like, biological life.

“The project beams Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc – an exoplanet 22 light years away that might support extraterrestrial life. Simply add #tweetsinspace to your texts during performance time. We will collect your tweets and transmit them into deep space via a high-powered radio messaging system. Our soon-to-be alien friends will receive unmediated thoughts and responses about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between,” says Stern.

Aimed at activating a conversation about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders, the tweets will be transmitted into space on 22 September between 8-8.30am IST (10:30-11pm EST). The live projections will happen at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico. The duo state that this performance differs from every past alien transmission as “It’s not only a public performance, it is a real-time conversation between hopeful peers sending their thoughts to everywhere and nowhere”.

“Anyone with an Internet connection can Tweet, and their messages will be included in our shotgun blast to the stars. We are directing our gaze, or rather tweets, via a high-powered radio telescope, towards GJ667Cc – one of the top candidates for alien life. It is part of a triple-star system, has a mass that is about four times that of Earth, and orbits a dwarf star at close range. It most certainly has liquid water, an essential component for the kind of life found on our own planet,” explains Kildall.

Currently, a one-time event, the duo is excited about initiating conversations with alien life, so that “we can transmit a dialogue between humans to deep space”.

reading in context: Your tweets, beamed across the universe

Artists and National Geographic both race to space
This article by Mary Louise Schumacher appeared in both the online and print editions of the MJS

When I heard the news, a scene from “The Right Stuff” flashed to mind, the one with a young Jeff Goldblum sprinting down the halls of power, bursting into a darkened room of bureaucrats to announce “They’ve got a man up there! It’s Gagarin!”Like the Cold War-era competition between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., two independent artists recently found themselves in a rivalry with National Geographic for supremacy in space. This particular space race, though, is about sending the Twitterverse into the universe.

We reported recently that two artists, including one from Milwaukee, planned to dispatch a multitude of tweets to the stars, more specifically to GJ667Cc — the closest Earth-like planet, 20 light years away.

After our initial report, the story was picked up around the globe, by Scientific American, the New York Daily News, Time, Forbes, the Daily Mail, BBC and others. Then, the artists were contacted by NatGeo. They, too, had precisely the same plan, to send tweets spaceward as a way to promote a new television series Chasing UFOs.

I’m not sure who’s Russia in this analogy, but I’m thinking it’s NatGeo, since it is bigger and about to be first, too. The artists, Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall, had announced their plans first but their scheduled lift-off was slated for September, during the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, while National Geographic planned its launch for late June.

In the race for space, being first is everything, and the artists felt a little like the Americans caught off guard by Yuri Gagarin’s surprise orbit in ’61. Instead of chilly diplomacy, though, National Geographic and the artists decided to work together to send 140-character bursts of texts into deep space.

National Geographic licensed the artists’ custom Twitter software and made their “Tweets in Space” project a partner. National Geographic will use the software to collect tweets with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs from 8 p.m. to midnight Eastern time the night of the new series premiere, June 29. They will then beam a digital package containing those tweets into deep space.

Then, the artists’ project “Tweets in Space” will go forward as planned, too. Stern and Kildall will gather tweets tagged #tweetsinspace between 8:30 and 9 p.m. Mountain time on Sept. 21 and project them into space during a live performance at the 18th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Albuquerque.

It’s a purposefully short window, they say. The artists are hoping that participants will consider not only what they’d want to say to aliens perhaps inhabiting the exoplanet, one of the closest planets that some say could support biological life, but to engage with each other, too. The idea is to send a conversation to the cosmos.

“Tweets in Space asks us to take a closer look at our spectacular need to connect, perform and network with others,” the artists state on the website for the project. “It creates a tension between the depth and shallowness of sharing 140 characters at a time with the entire Internet world, in all its complexity, richness and absurdity, by transmitting our passing thoughts to everywhere and nowhere.”

The artists say they see their project and National Geographic’s as benefiting each other. They are “two conceptual frames, two performances, two transmissions, and two different destinations.” With the help of National Geographic, the art project is closer to meeting its fundraising goals, too. They are raising funds at Rockethub until Monday.

Stern is an artist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Kildall is a San Francisco-based cross-disciplinary artist. They were also the initiators of the Wikipedia Art project, a public artwork initially composed on Wikipedia.

[videos created by the artists and National Geographic to explain their projects.]

read the entire article online
see it in the print edition

Finally, a chance to tweet to aliens
Leslie Katz for CNET

— Multimedia artists will beam real-time tweets to the newly discovered GJ667Cc light-years away. What do you want to say to your brother from another (exo)planet?

(Credit: Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern)

I have so much to say to aliens, I really doubt I could keep it to 140 characters. But if I’m going to go the “Tweets in Space” route to speak to potential life forms on GJ667Cc, I’ll need to keep it short.

The experimental art project will beam real-time tweets toward the exoplanet 22 light-years away during performance events at the 2012 International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in New Mexico.

Tweets will be streamed as animated Twitter spaceships towing messages.
(Credit: Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern)

“Simply tag your Twitter messages with #tweetsinspace, and your phones, laptops, mobile devices — anything with an Internet connection — will be transformed into an alien communicator,” says San Francisco new-media artist Scott Kildall, who is collaborating on the networked performance project with Nathaniel Stern, an associate professor in the Department of Art+Design at the University of Wisconsin’s Peck School of the Arts.

Scientists from Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of California at Santa Cruz who discovered GJ667Cc orbiting a triple-star system in February say its conditions might support Earth-like biological life.

Kildall and Stern can’t promise that your tweets will be read by a little green creature (or even a little water droplet) wielding a Samsung Galaxy S III. They can tell you, however, that your musings will be part of an exploration of “our spectacular need to connect, perform, and network with others. [The project] creates a tension between the depth and shallowness of sharing 140 characters at a time with the entire Internet world, in all its complexity, richness, and absurdity, by transmitting our passing thoughts and responses to everywhere and nowhere.”

The pair, currently seeking financial support for the endeavor on Kickstarter-like crowd-funding site RocketHub, say they’ll use the donations for either a “home-built or borrowed communication system” for shooting the tweets into space. They’ve raised more than $2,200 so far, and tell Crave that if they reach their minimum goal of $8,500, they’ll work with a team that can guarantee at least five light-years of travel for the messages toward GJ667Cc. “We’re hoping the alien listening devices are more advanced than our own, so they can pick it up,” they say.

These ‘twitters’ will be stretched across all time and space as a reflection on the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘status’ updates we broadcast, both literal and metaphoric. –Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

Apparently, not everyone appreciates the philosophical intent behind the project. “Expect FBI van in front of your house really soon,” one YouTube commenter threatens. Still, close to 1,000 #tweetsinspace messages have already come in. A favorite example: “No YOU hang up. (giggle) No, you hang up.”

In addition to getting beamed upward at ISEA in September, all #tweetsinspace messages will be streamed to a live public Web site, where they’ll be permanently archived. They’ll also be projected — as animated tweet-towing spaceships like the one pictured above — at the Balloon Museum and planetarium-like digital dome in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

RocketHub donations, meanwhile, will yield contributor rewards ranging from an acrylic Tweets in Space spaceship stencil and handmade Tweets in Space spaceship soap to (on the high end) a working, small-scale satellite model. Promise me a retweet by ET, guys, and I’m in.

See original article

‘We want to democratise the universe’: Artists plan to send your tweets into space
(…but will E.T. care about your musings?)
Eddie Wren for the Mail online

Twitter is a force for both the good and the mundane.

For every useful piece of information, witty statement, or earnest communication, there are a dozen tweets revealing such insights as ‘Fell over in the shower today LOLZ’.

Now, in a bid to democratise the universe, two multimedia artists plan to send out all and any tweets into the cosmos, sharing everything with any lurking aliens with an ISP.

All anyone has to do is add the hashtag #tweetsinspace to their message, and artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern will collect them and forward them on to E.T.

Tweets in Space: The campaign hopes to raise $8,500 in order to share humanity’s thoughts with the universe

The duo are collecting donations via RocketHub, a creative funding website, to fund the project.
Their aim is to ‘build or borrow a high tech communications system that will beam your real time text messages to a planet that can support extraterrestrial life.’

The pair are aiming to raise $8,500 – a surprisingly small amount for such a long-distance, 22 light-year phonecall – and so far have received more than $2,500. When they have their equipment, the pair will be ready to ‘inform extraterrestrial beings of our culture and society’ – both the good and the bad.

Asking for pledges, the pair say: ‘We will beam Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc – an exoplanet 22 light years away that might support earth-like biological life.

‘Anyone with an Internet connection can participate during two performance events, which will simultaneously take place online, at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2012, New Mexico), and in the stars.

‘By engaging the millions of voices in the Twitterverse and dispatching them into the larger Universe, Tweets in Space activates a potent discussion about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders or understanding. It is not just a public performance; it performs a public.’

Earth’s ambassador: Scott Kildall appeals through RocketHub for funding to get our messages out there

Beam it up: The duo hope to buy or hire powerful transmitting equipment to send our earth-bound messages off to the universe

The pair added: ‘We will collect all Twitter messages tagged #tweetsinspace and transmit them into the cosmos via either a home-built or borrowed communication system.

‘Our soon-to-be alien friends will receive scores of unmediated thoughts and feedback about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between.

‘All tweets will also be streamed to a live public website, where they’ll be permanently archived, as well as projected – as animated twitter spaceships towing messages – at the Balloon Museum and planetarium-like digital dome (IAIA), in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

‘Tweets in Space asks us to take a closer look at our spectacular need to connect, perform and network with others. It creates a tension between the depth and shallowness of sharing 140 characters at a time with the entire Internet world, in all its complexity, richness and absurdity, by transmitting our passing thoughts and responses to everywhere and nowhere.

‘These “twitters” will be stretched across all time and space as a reflection on the contemporary phenomenon of the “status” updates we broadcast, both literal and metaphoric.’

Kildall stated his reasons for the campaign in a video on RocketHub.

He said: ‘Previously only elite institutions or rich and powerful individuals could transmit to our alien friends.

‘We want to democratise the universe.’

On The Daily Mail

Tweeting to E.T.: Project Will Use Twitter to Send Messages to Space
Kris Holt writing for The Daily Dot and Mashable.com

Twitter’s bringing the world together in 140 characters or less. But can it bind together life forms from across the universe?

A project that aims to send tweets to a distant planet capable of sustaining life is in the process of being funded, and your tweets could potentially be picked up by extraterrestrial life forms.

At a live performance scheduled for September, Scott Keldall and Nathaniel Stern plan to send tweets bearing the #tweetsinspace hashtag to GJ667Cc, a planet that has the potential to support life. The planet is 22 light-years or around 164 trillion miles away.

The duo behind the plan has created other collaborative art projects in the past, such as Wikipedia Art—artwork that was composed on Wikipedia so that anyone can edit it. Following the success of that piece, they’re now looking to the stars.

“The intersection of our work is around networks and performance,” Kildall told the Daily Dot. “[S]ince we live in separate cities, communicating as many of us do exclusively by the Internet, we wanted to make a project in which the public could perform but also looked at our own need for understanding one another at 140 characters at a time.”

“Scott planted the initial seed of combining Internet art with transmission and space art,” Stern added. “[T]hrough our manic brainstorming process it grew into using the discussion platform of Twitter and lending an amplification and intensity to what it ‘does’ as a stage and platform, by beaming a feed to the closest exoplanet that might support Earth-like biological life.”

Stern and Kildall are seeking funding for the project through RocketHub, which, unlike Kickstarter, offers an All & More model where project creators get to take all the cash they raise—regardless of whether the project meets its stated goal. With 18 days remaining until the funding deadline, they’ve raised $2,080 of the $8,500 funding goal.

They plan to borrow or build a communication system, or upgrade an existing one. This will be used to send the tweets at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), taking place in Albuquerque, N.M., in September.

The pair plans to collect and transmit all tweets bearing the #tweetsinspace hashtag to GJ667Cc to inform extraterrestrial beings of our culture and society. The tweets will also be archived on a website.

“By structuring this project as a performance, we will have a live component where people can respond to each other’s tweets in both physical space at ISEA, and at home, through the Tweets in Space website,” Kildall noted. “Each tweet can then build upon the previous, so that extraterrestrials who are listening could hear a whole conversation rather than single short messages.”

Stern said the project is more than a public performance, that it aims to encapsulate how humans converse:

“Although we take the science of the project very seriously, this project is more about us than anything else. What do we say, and to whom, in public, online, in brief? How do we respond? What does that do? These are questions worth asking in the everyday, and Tweets in Space reminds us how important these questions are, by making them more important, even if just for 45 minutes in September.”

So far, the project has created a spirited debate on Twitter.

“There has of course been criticism (mostly social, some scientific), but more excitement,” Stern noted. “There have already been #tweetsinspace political posts, requests for pick up, and dialogues around impossibility and imagination.”

We’ve already had astronauts tweeting from out with the Earth’s atmosphere. Getting a @reply from outside the galaxy would be—quite literally—out of this world.

‘Tweets in Space’ plans to send Twitter messages to a planet that may support life
Scientists say the recently discovered planet has the potential to support some form of life
Brian Browdie for the NY Daily News

“Tweets in Space,” a live performance event expected to take place this fall, will broadcast Twitter messages to a planet 22 light-years away that scientists say may support life.

Get ready to tweet to the cosmos.

Twitter users around the world may be able to find followers 22 light-years away thanks to “Tweets in Space,” a project that hopes to beam 140-character missives to a potentially habitable planet this fall.

During a live performance set for September 21 at the Albuquerque Balloon Museum, collaborators Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern plan to beam tweets carrying the hashtag #tweetsinspace all the way to GJ667Cc.

Scientists say the recently discovered planet has the potential to support some form of life.

“We look at it from the standpoint of democratizing deep space transmissions,” Kildall told the Daily News. “All tweets sent during the performance, whether you’re at the event or at home on your computer, will be transmitted.”

“We thought it would be worthwhile to show the sea change in how information is broadcast in our culture,” he added.

Kildall and Stern expect to send out their interplanetary Twitter feed via a high-powered radio transmitter. They hope to pay for the gear with donations they collect via the fundraising website rockethub.com.

So far, they’ve amassed nearly $1,600 of the $8,500 they say they’ll need to beam the messages a distance of five light-years.

There hope is that five light years is far enough into space for any ET’s on GJ667Cc who might be tuning in to pick up the signal.

“We’re making some assumptions about their listening technology,” Stern told the Daily News. “We’re assuming a similar intelligence to our own can pick out patterns.”

A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or the equivalent of 5.88 trillion miles.

Stern says he and Kildall are discussing the project with scientists in the research, governmental and commercial fields who may be able to contribute expertise in sending signals into outer space.

On Daily News.com

“Tweets in Space beams Twitter discussions from participants worldwide towards GJ667Cc – an exoplanet 22 light years away that might support earth-like biological life. Simply add #tweetsinspace to your texts during the allotted performance times, as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico (ISEA2012). We will collect your tweets and transmit them into deep space via a high-powered radio messaging system.”

Tweets in Space exploded into an online phenomenon months before launch: just as we began fundraising for the transmission in April 2012. This started with coverage on Forbes.com, Scientific American (twice), the NY Daily News, and Time.com, and continued to proliferate via BBC Radio 4, The Daily Mail, in the blogosophere, twitterverse and mainstream press in the weeks leading up to performance time. Of note are also The Daily Dot (2012), Wired (2012), Washington Post (2012), Wisconsin Public Radio (2012), Furtherfield (2012), The Sunday Guardian (2012),Chip Chick, Twitchy, The Escapist, DVice, Twittermania, Media Bistro, Mashable.com and the Journal Sentinel – the lattermost of which originally broke the story. A complete list of original articles with links (not including reblogs) is available at tweetsinspace.org.