If You Were a Secret Message, Where in the Human Genome Would You Hide?

When people think about SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, they imagine messages sent via radio—Jodie Foster tuning antennas, hoping to pick up signals from the “billions and billions” of star systems pondered by Carl Sagan. Potential extraterrestrials might be beaming out messages into space and all we need to do is listen for them. Of course, even using light—the fastest possible signal-carrier—we would still have to wait years for messages from even the closest stars to reach us. And that presumes that we are listening at just the right moment in the Universe’s 13.8-billion-year history. The odds that different civilizations across the galaxy overlap so precisely that we could listen right now to aliens’s messages could be quite low.

But there’s another potential way to send signals across the cosmos, albeit one that requires a great deal of patience and expertise: storing messages inside genetic material. Encoding a message in an organism or virus and then sending it on an interstellar voyage to other planets.”