“My love to the aliens”: What was the first song beamed directly into space?
Personally, I think space should be left alone. There are things too big to even fathom, let alone begin actually exploring – but who am I to deprive whatever might be up there of some good music?
Then again though, whatever is up there might have music of its own. It would be selfish to think that in a universe with an observable diameter of roughly 93 billion light-years, and then however much more there is that can’t be observed, that there is no other creatures busy making tunes.
Surely somewhere out there, on one of the many, many planets beyond our own solar system, there are beings in bands. Maybe they don’t have guitars and drums, maybe their venues don’t look like our own sticky-floored dance halls, but in this vast and unknown galaxy, there must be music being made by something, somewhere.
Perhaps on a far off planet, huge bands are prepping to release their fifth album and set off on a world tour around their own terrains. Maybe they’re pushing the boundaries of genre and production, maybe they’ve unlocked styles and sounds we couldn’t even dream of. Or, maybe, it’s much more similar than we’d expect. There’s alien Taylor Swift, alien Arctic Monkeys. Alien rock and roll, alien shoegaze and so on.
The entire concept of space exploration freaks me out, if I’m honest. In the words of Lucy Dacus during an interview on the Boygenius album release circuit, when the topic of going to space came up, she said simply, “That is none of our business”. Leave that to the aliens and leave the earth to us, I say, but for those more curious and inclined to begin messing around with the unknown, NASA couldn’t resist sharing some tunes as if they thought music could help open up some interplanetary niceties.
So, what was the first song played in space?
It was in 2008 that NASA decided to share a song with space. Decades on from the first time man landed on the moon, and as advancements in space exploration were rapidly moving forward, they decided to do something less colonising and more cultured by blasting the first song into the galaxy.
It wasn’t that they just set up a super high-volume speaker. Instead, it came in the form of an interstellar radio message, using a 70-meter “DSS-63” dish from the NASA Deep Space Network. The message was launched from a space station in Madrid and then was essentially beamed up to any technology floating up there – and there’s a lot.
This wasn’t the first time a message had been sent up to space, but it was the first time they were going to use the technology simply to play a song. When the question of what that song should be was raised, the right pick became clear as the stars aligned (sorry).
On February 4th, 2008, it was a string of anniversaries. It was the 45th anniversary of the DSN and the 50th anniversary of NASA. It was also the 40th anniversary of the day that The Beatles recorded ‘Across The Universe’.
“Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe,” John Lennon sang into the mic that day and 40 years later, it felt like the perfect option for Space’s first song.
Technically, though, this wasn’t the first music that had been played into space. In 2001, Russia got there first with the Teen Age Message, which was a series of six transmissions into space. They included a theremin concert, so really that was the first Earth music aliens perhaps heard. The second was in 2003 during the Cosmic Call where Ukraine tried to have a go. On the playlist there was David Bowie’s ‘Starman’, but their plan didn’t run very smooth.
The 2008 NASA attempt did, though, meaning that without a hitch or issue, The Beatles’ ‘Across The Universe’ was played across the universe, at the same time as fans on earth were encouraged to play it too, making it an event that spanned the galaxies.
Paul McCartney endorsed that as he said, “Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.” There was never any word from the aliens, so who knows what star rating they might have given the track in their own extraterrestrial music magazines.
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