Is David Bowie Really Going To Send Music Into the Final Frontier?

This one is a head-scratcher for me too. This week the Webmaster and I came across two stories about Michael C. Luckman‘s Signals to Space Concerts. Luckman plans to hold music festivals in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, China, Russia, Mexico and London and beam the music out into space for extraterrestrial beings to hear. The goal is to make peaceful contact, Voyager 1 and 2-style. No dates, venues, or line-up for the concerts have been determined but Luckman is hoping to sign David Bowie as a headliner along with Sir Paul McCartney, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson (!?), and Aerosmith.

I’m not sure the point of this concert series. According to Luckman, he and the producer are going to send the music to “targets in our solar systems[sic], including Mars and the moon.” The last time I checked there was not life on Mars (groan groan, I know, horrible pun) nor was there life on the moon. Furthermore, every radio signal that is sent to any receiver on Earth eventually makes it’s way out of the atmosphere and into space. So any extraterrestrial life that is tuning in to our frequencies will already know what we listen to and how much boy bands and poptarts suck. Not to mention that the Voyager satellites already have sound files containing not just music but also general sounds that a person living on Earth might experience in their lifetime. This concert series idea sounds like Luckman is just trying to promote his book that he published two years ago and is trying to enlist all of the living artists he mentioned on it’s pages to help him do so.