First Contact

Ira Glass mentions a very silly mistake he made with a girl when he was in junior high. Then comedian Mike Birbiglia tells the story of his rocky foray into the world of making out with girls. Mike has a book coming out this Fall called Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories, which features this story and some others he’s told here on This American Life. (15 minutes)

Ira Glass speaks with Paul Davies, chair of the Post-Detection Task Force of SETI. That stands for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, and Paul’s task is to figure out what to say to space aliens if we find them. Paul suggests starting simple, with binary code. But other people have some very different ideas, solicited by the social networking site Bebo. We heard about Paul Davies from an article that Jon Ronson wrote in the Guardian. (7 minutes)

In 2008, 501 images were beamed from a radio telescope in Eupatoria, Ukraine, towards Gliese 581 c, a planet 118 trillion miles away. People around the world submitted ideas to a social networking site called Bebo, and then users voted on the ones they thought should actually be sent, with the thought that extraterrestrials might one day receive them. The radio signal will take about 20 years to reach its destination. Here are a few of the images, courtesy of RDF Contact: