Peak 2017: NASA to Send Tweet to Aliens

Do aliens use Tweetdeck? Or Twitter for iPhone? Or if it’s something else, how do they read tweets? That’s an important question because, to honor the 40th anniversary of Voyager’s mission to deep space, NASA wants to send a single tweet into the heavens to represent all of humanity. And NASA wants your ideas for what we will send into interstellar space.

The exercise is inspired by a set of friendly messages, images, and music that are on Voyager’s Golden Record. The agency will pick one tweet to send on September 5, the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1, in the direction of the far-flung spacecraft.

Given that Twitter is short-form communication and it’s not always easy to provide context in a single tweet, just sending one is a lot of pressure. I’d say at least a third of my tweets are misunderstood every day. The last thing we need is a humorless alien from a nuance-free advanced race that doesn’t get the tweet and-BOOM!-bye bye Earth.

Upside: NASA is tacitly admitting that even aliens hate Facebook.