Company wants to beam your message to aliens 
 
 Ever feel that Twitter, Facebook and tumblr just don’t have the reach you were after? That social media is just too, I don’t know … terrestrial? 
 
 Well, a new company says it will start firing your tweet-length messages and more at distant galactic entities starting tomorrow. First up is Gliese 526, a red dwarf star 17.6 light years away. It may or may not have planets but odds are it does, though civilized plants are a whole other matter. 
 
 Nevertheless, the startup project Lone Signal is planning to retrofit the Jamesburg Earth Station radio dish in Carmel, Calif., to beam a steady signal carrying technical data that will identify Earth and show its inhabitants are smart enough to do so in math. 
 
 Piggybacking on that main signal will be a secondary one carrying messages from Earthlings. It’s unclear what that will show aliens … 
 
 The Jamesburg station is currently still listed for sale at $1.5 million, but the real estate company listing it said there is a contract on the station but the deal just hasn’t closed yet. 
 
 Long shot 
 
 Since Gliese 526 is 17.6 light years from Earth, the messages will be beamed to the coordinates of where the star will be in 17.6 years from now. 
 
 Lone Signal won’t just send out blips of data, the company’s chief science officer, Jacob Haqq-Misra, told The Guardian Express. 
 
 It will also continuously transmit content from cultures around the world. The messages that the company will broadcast will be directed toward a different star system roughly once a month. Haqq-Misra explains that radio signals are the fastest and most sufficient delivery method of messages for long distances. He hopes, the Guardian reports, to “inspire a lot of passion in the space sciences and get people thinking about their role in the greater universe.” 
 
 And, of course, the chances of any life sophisticated enough to notice the signal and reply are pretty darn slim. Not to mention that any conversation will take dozens of years between send and receive. 
 
 What happens when aliens answer back? 
 
 The broader effort to reach out to aliens is called METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or Active SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). 
 
 And, not everyone is happy about beaming our address into space where who-knows-what can hear it and send a reactionary squad of murders to check us out. 
 
 “And indeed … the larger issue here is that Haqq-Misra and his colleagues are acting completely unilaterally,” writes io9, a space science journal. 
 
 No one has given them permission to do this, nor have they consulted the larger community. In all likelihood, our messages will never reach the ears of an alien civilization ... But it’s the shouting out in the cosmos aspect that’s the real issue here. We simply do not know the risks. Consequently, we should take great care when embarking upon projects such as this. Like Brin has suggested, this should be the part of a much broader conversation, and not some silly exercise intended to make a bit of money. 
 
 Related P-I story: 
 
 How it’s supposed to work? 
 
 As of this afternoon, you can signup to get an email for when the site is fully operational, which is supposed to be tomorrow – June 18. You can check out their trippy promo video, but that’s about it right now. 
 
 In its story on the METI effort, Universe Today reported how the company plans to let you send messages and more: 
 
 Share Beams / Track Beams – Once signed in, users can see how far their beam has traveled from Earth as well as share it with the beaming community. 
 
 Dedicate Beams – Parents, friends and loved ones can dedicate a beam to others. 
 
 Explore – The Explore section gives beamers current data on the Lone Signal beam, who is sending messages, from where on Earth, overall stats, etc. 
 
 Blog / Twitter – Via their blog and Twitter, the Lone Signal science team and other contributors will be posting opinion articles on associated topics of interest as well as sharing the latest science news and updates. 
 
 You’ll get one free message and then you can pay for more, such as longer messages as well as images. 
 
 Jake Ellison can be reached at 206-448-8334 or jakeellison@seattlepi.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* us on Facebook. ||||| Mikhail Turnovskiy/Alamy Stock Photo 
 
 Are you there, ET? Recent news of a spike in radio signals that could fit the profile for an intelligent, extraterrestrial source has SETI astronomers across the globe swinging their radio dishes in hopes of confirming the detection. Although so far they have all come back empty-handed, two observatories will follow up on the tantalising signal again tonight. 
 
 The signal was detected on May 15, 2015 by a radio telescope operated by the Russian Academy of Science. It appeared to come from the star HD 164595, a sun-like star located roughly 95 light-years from Earth. The system has only one known planet: a warm Neptune, so called because it is gaseous like Neptune but orbits its star in only 40 days. But the star probably has other planets — perhaps rocky ones — as well. 
 
 The researchers speculate that such a bright signal, if real, could have been produced by a radio beacon built by an intelligent civilisation. 
 
 If that beacon is transmitting radio waves in all directions, the energy it would need to produce is a whopping 1020 watts, says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California. “That’s a big energy bill even if you’re getting a bulk discount from your local supplier,” he jokes. “It’s hundreds of times more than all the energy falling on the Earth from sunlight.” 
 
 That means the hypothetical beings responsible might be what SETI scientists call a Kardashev Type II civilisation, so advanced that they can tap all of the energy being produced by their host star. 
 
 If instead the beacon was targeted at Earth, then the power needed drops to 1013 watts, Shostak says. “That is more or less the total amount of energy used by humankind — all the cars, all the planes, all the electronic devices, everything,” Shostak says. “This is not a high-school science project.” 
 
 That would make the senders a Kardashev Type I civilisation, able to harness all the starlight that falls on its home planet. 
 
 Jumping to conclusions? 
 
 Although it’s fun to speculate, it’s far more likely that the signal isn’t an extraterrestrial beacon at all, but actually earthly interference. Radio telescopes have been known to pick up rogue signals – everything from flushing toilets to cell phones. Just last year, astronomers at the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia traced a mysterious type of radio signal to two on-site microwave ovens. 
 
 “In SETI part of the problem is that you have a civilisation that is producing signals that can mess you up all the time – and that civilisation is called humanity,” Shostak says. 
 
 So before astronomers jump to any conclusion, they’re attempting to detect the signal again. Last night, the SETI Institute used the Allen Telescope Array in northern California to track the star. They saw nothing, but will observe again tonight. 
 
 That lack of detection doesn’t close the book on an extraterrestrial civilisation just yet. “You can’t say because you didn’t find something that there’s nothing there,” Shostak says. “Say Captain Cook sailed around all day in the South Pacific and he didn’t find any new islands. That doesn’t prove that there are no new islands, it just proves that he didn’t find any that day.” 
 
 A civilisation might also try to send signals at multiple frequencies, says Douglas Vakoch, the president of METI International, a group that wants to send messages to ET as well as detect their signals. Perhaps last night, they simply weren’t broadcasting at the same frequency we initially detected. 
 
 Read more: SETI looks at red dwarf stars in its search for ancient aliens 
 
 “If you really want to communicate a lot of information there are advantages to sending at optical frequencies,” he says. “So we are planning to observe the star from our optical SETI observatory in Panama this evening. We tried last night but the weather didn’t cooperate.” 
 
 Still, Vakoch is not particularly optimistic that they will find anything. “I think the likely outcome of this is that there’s no indication that it’s ET, but it provides a critical preparation for a day we may really discover intelligence out there,” he says. “We can speculate as much as we want about whether there’s intelligence out there in the cosmos, but unless we find something interesting and do a rigorous follow-up, we’ll never know.” 
 
 An earlier version of this story misstated the distance to the star. This has been corrected. ||||| An international team of scientists from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is investigating mysterious signal spikes emitting from a 6.3-billion-year-old star in the constellation Hercules—95 light years away from Earth. The implications are extraordinary and point to the possibility of a civilization far more advanced than our own. 
 
 The unusual signal was originally detected on May 15, 2015, by the Russian Academy of Science-operated RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia, but was kept secret from the international community. Interstellar space reporter Paul Gilster broke the story after the researchers quietly circulated a paper announcing the detection of “a strong signal in the direction of HD164595.” 
 
 READ ALSO: NASA Director Reveals the 4 Places Most Likely to Have Alien Life In Our Solar System 
 
 The mysterious star’s designation is HD164595, and it’s considered to be sun-like in nature with a nearly identical metallic composition to our own star. So far, a single Neptune-like (but warmer) planet has been discovered in its orbit—HD 164595 b. But as Gilster explained, “There could, of course, be other planets still undetected in this system.” 
 
 Decorated Italian SETI researcher and mathematician Claudio Maccone along with Russia’s Nikolai Bursov of the Special Astrophysical Observatory are the principal scientists working on the apparent discovery. They claim that “permanent monitoring of this target is needed.” 
 
 “The signal conceivably fits the profile for an intentional transmission from an extraterrestrial source,” said Alan Boyle, author of The Case for Pluto who reported the story for Geekwire. “In any case, the blip is interesting enough to merit discussion by those who specialize in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” 
 
 The signal’s strength indicates that if it in fact came from a isotropic beacon, the power source would have to be built by a Kardashev Type II civilization. (The Kardashev scale is used to determine the progress of a civilization’s technological development by measuring how much energy was used to transmit an interstellar message.) An ‘Isotropic’ beacon means a communication source emitting a signal with equal power in all directions while promoting signal strength throughout travel. 
 
 In his acclaimed work “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev explained that a Type II civilization would be able to harness the energy of their entire host star. The most common hypothetical example of this would be a Dyson Sphere—which is a massive artificial structure that could completely encapsulate a star and transfer the energy to a nearby planet. 
 
 Basically, if the signal was beamed out into the galaxy without aim or direction, that would require an enormous amount of power to actually be detected. But what if the signal was beamed specifically at our solar system? Well, that would require less energy and could indicate the presence of a Kardashev Type I civilization—meaning that it could be a highly technological, contemporary society that harnesses the solar energy emitted by its local star, much like our planet does with solar panels. This particular civilization’s social structure is theorized to be completely globalized and interconnected. 
 
 “The signal is provocative enough that the RATAN-600 researchers are calling for permanent monitoring of this target,” said Gilster. And that’s exactly what is transpiring. As of last night, the SETI institute is diverting its Allen Telescope Array in northern California to investigate while their counterparts at METI International (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) will use Panama’s Boquete Optical Observatory. 
 
 The detection of the mysterious signal and the ensuing investigations will be discussed at the IAA SETI Permanent Committee during the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, on September 27—the same day and location where Elon Musk will reveal his plans to colonize Mars. The Observer will be following up on both these stories from the Congress. 
 
 Robin Seemangal focuses on NASA and advocacy for space exploration. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he currently resides. Find him on Instagram for more space-related content: @nova_road.
– As of today, you can fire off a tweet-length message to a far-flung solar system, but you'll need patience—it won't get there for about 18 years, and it will take just as long to receive any extra-terrestrial response. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer explains, a start-up called Lone Signal has begun sending submitted text messages in all languages to the Gliese 526 solar system. The first one is free, and then a group of four will set you back 99 cents, reports CNNMoney. The company is making use of the Jamesburg Earth Station in California's Carmel Valley to send the messages, and it hopes to expand its operations in the coming years to every hemisphere. Along with the text messages, the company is sending up missives written in binary code that explain our understanding of physics. Also fair game? Animated GIFs, and the Verge has a peek at the first one going up—of a guy scratching his ear.