At One Time You Could Talk to Aliens for $3.99 per Minute

Once upon a time now forgotten, a web site called TalkToAliens.com was launched that allowed anyone to dial a premium rate US number and have their call routed through a powerful 3.2-meter-wide satellite dish in central Connecticut. From there, the call was beamed out into the cosmos, with the hope that some distant alien civilization with a big enough radio receiver (like the famous Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico) might pick it up.

“This is the chance of a lifetime, folks,” said Eric Knight, president of the company behind the site. “For just $3.99 per minute, you can make direct contact with extraterrestrials. Who knows what kind of unbelievable secrets of the universe they might share with us?”

The engineers were not aiming the dish at any specific stars they thought might harbor life. Instead, they scanned across the entire Milky Way galaxy, covering a wide range of nearby stars, just in case. And the calls did come in – since the service launched, the web site fielded hundreds of calls, with each one lasting around three minutes on average.

The site was operated by a small group of radio and broadcast engineers who were part of the Civilian Space Exploration Team (CSXT). The company was headed by Eric Knight, who was the former avionics manager of CSXT. Knight described the company as a public service to give “every citizen on planet earth who has access to phone or computer an equal opportunity to use this service.”

While the chances of an alien response were slim, Knight said it would be the “ultimate reward” if they were able to establish dialogue with alien races. The service was launched on February 27, 2005 and had fielded hundreds of calls by early March.

The site had an audio soundscape background with it, and it was similar to this.  I liked it enough to create my own version of the loop. Press play to hear it. Some browsers put a pause in this background sound, so it isn’t a clean loop, while others make it a nice seamless loop.

Audio Loop Gap Problem?

The mp3 specification adds a few miliseconds of silence at the start of the track. If you load a track into an audio editor like audacity you can see this gap. There is a real art to making a seamless mp3 loop.[3] If you edit the track to remove the silence, it will be back when you re-load it. The recommendation is to use the ogg format instead of mp3 as ogg does not add any silence to the start of the track. The ogg format, however, does not play in all browsers. Example here.

How About A Wav?

Even a compressed wave is several times larger than an MP3, and for me it still did not loop, it added a pause on smart phones.

You Could Send Email to Space

Here is what the old web site said, the part where you could send an email to space:

So what happened to the site? Why is it now a parked domain that is for sale, like so many others? The domain appears to have been registered recently in 2023, but there is no substantive content or activity associated with it. According to the search results, the TalkToAliens service operated by Eric Knight was taken down due to a lack of public interest and the slim chances of actually establishing communication with aliens.

The search results indicate that the service was seen by some as a “dodgy” money-making scheme, with one source stating “Paying USD 3.99 per minute to talk to empty space reminds me of dodgy star naming companies and their money making.” The search results do not indicate that the service was forcibly shut down or faced any legal issues. It appears the service simply faded away due to lack of sustained public engagement and doubts about its viability[1][2]. It was likely taken down sometime after its launch in early 2005.

Citations

[1] https://www.space.com/894-list-space-calling-cosmos-commercial.html
[2] https://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/200503.shtml
[3] https://www.compuphase.com/mp3/mp3loops.htm