A message beamed into space invites aliens to visit Lexington, Kentucky

If you were an alien from TRAPPIST-1, a star some 40 light-years away from Earth, searching for signs of intelligent life, you might spot an odd burst of infrared light coming from our solar system. If you were wily enough to infer that the infrared light was a message in binary code from another civilization, you might decipher it and piece together a pixelated image.

Then, if you – the alien – somehow understood English, you’d be able to read the message at the bottom: “Visit Lexington, Kentucky.”

That’s the best-case scenario the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau envisioned when it beamed an interstellar travel advertisement into the cosmos in late October, inviting aliens to come enjoy the city’s bluegrass fields and bourbon.

The tourism bureau announced the moonshot travel ad in a news release Tuesday as part of a campaign to attract more Earthly visitors. But the extraterrestrial outreach was real, and grounded in research of potentially habitable planets and previous efforts to transmit messages about humanity to the stars, experts told the Washington Post – leaving an infinitesimally small chance that an alien’s first message from Earth could be an invite from the Bluegrass State.

“A lot of people think Kentucky is a flyover state, and it’s nice to give them the impression that maybe we’re not,” said Robert Lodder, a professor of chemistry at the University of Kentucky who consulted on Lexington’s message to the stars. “… And that Earth is not a flyover planet.”

Lexington’s promoters came up with the unusual idea to capitalize on the interest around UFOs and space travel amid last year’s congressional hearings on the subject. Leslie Miller, vice president of marketing at the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the space-faring theme still fit with the bureau’s promotional goals. They needed to market Lexington as a welcoming, friendly place.

“What better way to do that than … bring the first tourism ad (for) Lexington to extraterrestrials and invite aliens to come here?” Miller said.

Lodder, a Lexington resident who was already passionate about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (a field commonly abbreviated as SETI), was tapped to help the team. He had experience in the field as a member of the SETI League, an organization of amateur radio operators who search the sky for signals from other planets, and was more than happy to help.

“People would say, ‘Why don’t you advertise for all of Earth?’ ” Lodder said. “Well, you know, that makes a longer message and it’s harder. So if somebody wants me to send an ad for Lexington? Sure. I’ll send that.”

Lodder knew putting together a message to send from Earth would be more of a challenge than listening for signals from home. It has been done before, most famously in 1974 when scientists broadcast a message from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico to a cluster of stars 25,000 light-years from Earth. The message was a string of binary code – with ones and zeros denoted by shifts in the frequency of a radio-wave transmission – that could be decoded into a grid of colored pixels arranged to represent several mathematic and scientific concepts, including the rough outline of a human. It was mostly a cosmic brag, scientists told the Cornell Chronicle in 1999, to show humanity had the capability to transmit such a message.

Lodder and his team chose the same structure for their message. But they had a lot more to say. Lodder said he consulted with experts in engineering, linguistics, philosophy and science fiction as the team decided how best to market Lexington to an extraterrestrial.

The message opens with symbols representing a sequence of prime numbers to show that it’s from an intelligent civilization, Lodder said. Farther down, pixels show the shape of chemical symbols representing water and ethanol (the components of bourbon) and dopamine (“Because Lexington is fun!”). Underneath the chemical symbols are the outlines of two horses and a human and an illustration of a rolling grass field – Lexington’s “iconic bluegrass landscape.” The pixel grid ends with letters spelling out in English the city’s invitation.

Also encoded in the infrared message are several gray-scale photos of Lexington and a short music recording from Lexington blues musician Tee Dee Young, according to the city’s news release.

“We want to send things to show that we’re interesting,” Lodder said, “… so they get some idea about what life on Earth is like.”

Lodder and the tourism bureau beamed the message into space using a powerful laser aimed in the direction of TRAPPIST-1 during a small event at Kentucky Horse Park on Oct. 24 after receiving approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Miller said. Now, they’ll wait around 40 years for the message to reach its destination – and another 40 years for a potential reply.

Does Kentucky have a shot at achieving first contact? Probably not, said Andrew Siemion, the chair of SETI research at the SETI Institute. Even assuming that aliens exist near TRAPPIST-1, receiving Lexington’s transmission requires a lot of timing and luck, Siemion said. An alien scanning the skies should be able to notice that the infrared laser coming from Earth is artificial, and maybe even decode it, he said. But that requires any alien instruments to be pointed in the direction of our planet at the exact moment it arrives from Lexington.

“If they weren’t looking in our direction in 40 years, at that particular hour, then they would miss it,” Siemion said.

But Siemion said he was impressed with the project and how it had emulated the 1974 Arecibo message to send a viable transmission into the cosmos. He also said Lexington had picked a smart target: NASA has touted TRAPPIST-1 as a tantalizing prospect for extraterrestrial life, with several rocky planets orbiting the star in its habitable zone where conditions are such that liquid water could exist.

Siemion said he imagined that any TRAPPIST-1 aliens would react similarly to Earth’s scientists upon discovering signs of life on another planet: “We would train our telescopes on it, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, around the world,” he said.

Maybe, if their instruments are powerful enough, they might even be able to locate the bluegrass fields of Kentucky. If they decided to visit, how would Lexington welcome them?

“I don’t know that we’ve gotten that far yet,” Miller laughed.