Now even life forms in the far reaches of the galaxy will get to enjoy music from John, Paul, George and Ringo.
On Monday the Beatles go universal and will make history thanks to NASA and a couple of noteworthy anniversaries.
The space agency plans to broadcast the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe” across the galaxy to Polaris, the North Star. According to NASA officials, it will be the first-ever beaming of a radio song directly into deep space.
So what’s the occasion for the historic moment? It’s not to lighten the spirits of space aliens as Paul McCartney recently joked through a Beatles historian. Rather, the broadcast celebrates the 40th anniversary of the song, the 45th anniversary of NASA’s Deep Space Network, which communicates with its distant probes, and the 50th anniversary of NASA.
Blasting a song into outer space might sound simple enough, but when your target is 2.5 quadrillion miles away there is a certain amount of logistics that needs to be ironed out.
According to NASA officials, just under four minutes of the original version of the song will be loaded on an MP3 player and will be transmitted digitally at 7 p.m. EST Monday from a giant antenna in Madrid, Spain. But if you wanted to hear it on Polaris, you would need an antenna and a receiver to convert it back to music, the same way people receive satellite television. Oh, and did I mention that it will take 431 years for the song to reach anything with the capacity to hear it? That’s because Polaris is 2.5 quadrillion miles away.
The far out idea came from a Los Angeles-based Beatles historian, who then got permission from McCartney, Yoko Ono and the two companies that own the rights to Beatles’ music. The Beatlemaniac says it didn’t take much to persuade NASA to embrace the idea after that.
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