From Me To You (or from Us to Them)

(PHOTO: DOZIBEE)

Because they’ve got time on their hands and a sense of the random, NASA are sending The Beatles into space. It’s the 40th anniversary of their song Across the Universe, the 50th anniversary of NASA, and the 45th anniversary of the Deep Space Network, and so the song is going to be sent to Polaris. But it’s not going to be there anytime soon - in about 431 years to be exact. And even after all that time, the aliens on Polaris can only listen if they have an appropriate receiver to decode it. I’m not sure that we’re giving off the right sort of impression, as Across the Universe is a deeply bizarre song. I reckon we’d be much more likely to get the aliens to come down to meet us if they thought we all live in a yellow submarine (tub of margarine, bubble gum machine)....