File this under, “I Wish I Thought of It First.” From New Scientist:

A group of engineers has offered a solution for people who want a direct line to aliens - by broadcasting their phone calls directly into space.

People wanting to contact extraterrestrial beings through www.TalkToAliens.com can dial a premium rate US number and have their call routed through a transmitter and sent into space through a 3.2-metre-wide dish in central Connecticut, US.

The service, launched on 27 February, will cost users $3.99 per minute, says Eric Knight, president of the company. He says that a large radio receiver - like the Arecibo dish in Puerto Rico - situated on a distant planet might be large enough for an alien civilisation to receive the calls.

TalkToAliens.com is also currently hard at work to get your text messages sent into space as well. Digital photos and video are soon to follow. Supposedly they’ve already fielded hundreds of calls, averaging three minutes each.

This, to me, is a really brilliant money-making scheme, although I do wonder about the level of just trash that we’ll be sending out to space. Chances are, we’re already sending out enormous noise electronically into the cosmos - let alone spiritually or metaphysically.

The other issue this raises in my mind is a little bit weirder.

The company is not monitoring the phone calls to space but, on its website, people are asked to be “good Earth Ambassadors”. Knight adds: “I think people should use common sense and judgment, too.”

Like, say, what if people decide to send out message like “FUCK YOU ALIEN QUEERS! YOU FUCKING SCUMBAGS! COME DOWN HERE AND I’LL TEAR YOU A NEW CORNSHOOT!” Stuff like that. I mean, what if literally hundreds of people did that? Would it have any effect? If we all concentrated hard enough, could we enrage some distant civilization with the sheer inanity of our messages? And if the number of annoying ass emails I get through my website is any indication, then we’d most definitely be getting some major fuckers talking to ET here.

And what about the obvious lost revenue potential here, where people could pay a little money to hear what kind of stuff other people are saying to the aliens? Maybe there could be a hotline where you pay another $3.99 to listen in on outgoing calls - anonymously of course. You can guarantee there would be some WIGGY shit being said.

Then there’s this whole thing with people trying to use “ritual magick” or other weird occult ideas. Some people claim that Aleister Crowley, L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons and some others are actually what started our current modern wave of alien visitations. Crowley supposedly opened a portal, and encountered something similar to a grey alien, which he named Lam. He used Dr. John Dee’s occult language “Enochian” to do it. Dee himself supposedly learned it from “angelic” visitors. (For more fun on this topic, check out Rigorous Intuition’s excellent “Occult History of the National Security State” and Adam Gorightly’s Ritual Magic, Mind Control and the UFO Phenomenon)

Anyway, I don’t know how serious I am about all that as a possibility, but it is kind of a creepy thing to think about: some moron accidentally inviting certain destruction on our race, just cause they decided to prank call outer space.

[Found via Xenophilia]