On February 4, 2008, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration crew at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex aimed its antennas towards Polaris, the Northern star and beamed The Beatles’ famous song Across the Universe (National Aeronautics and Space Administration 2017). The reasons? To commemorate:

• 40th anniversary of the song being recorded,
• 50th anniversary of NASA,
• 50th anniversary of the Explorer 1 satellite,
• 45th anniversary of the Deep Space Network

The project, however, was not without criticism. Zaitsev (2008, 1112) mention a few problems from a purely scientific point of view:

• The planetary system around Polaris «is not suited for the origin of life in accordance with the modern level of knowledge»
• According to their own estimates,

  the transmission rate is 300000 times higher than that required and transmission of this song (…) at an admissible rate requires 750 days of continuous broadcasting!

• Was done mostly as a publicity stunt «that was not substantiated (…) a profanation of the idea of interstellar radio broadacasting»

Paul McCartney, on the other hand, reacted positively to the transmission (msnbc.com staff and news service reports 2013):

Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.

Van Eck's Sequence ← Andy’s Brevity Quest 2019 (273 words) → Half your age plus seven

References

msnbc.com staff, and news service reports. 2013. “NASA Beaming Beates Tune to the Stars.” Edited by NBC News. 2013. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22951001.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 2017. “NASA Beams Beatles’ ’Across the Universe’ into Space.” Edited by NASA Content Administrator. August 7, 2017. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/across_universe.html.

Zaitsev, A. L. 2008. “The First Musical Interstellar Radio Message.” Journal of Communications Technology and Electronics 53 (9): 1107–13. https://doi.org/10.1134/s106422690809012x.