Scientists sends invitation to aliens to visit Earth for first time

An American group of scientists and linguists from the city of Lexington in Kentucky recorded and sent into space the first of its kind advertisement for inhabitants of other worlds with an appeal to visit our planet and Lexington in particular as tourists, Azernews reports, citing the portal Space .com.

The message contains an encoded image of the hilly landscape of Kentucky, figures of a man and horses, as well as diagrams of water molecules, ethyl alcohol and the happiness hormone dopamine. The last part is related to the fact that Kentucky is famous for its bourbon industry.

The signal was sent using an infrared laser to the TRAPPIST-1 star system, located 40 light-years or 378 trillion kilometers from Earth.

Experts chose TRAPPIST-1 because it contains a large number of potentially habitable planets. The announcement will reach its destination by 2063.

"We are targeting the TRAPPIST-1 system because we can get an answer from there within the lifetime of one person, provided that someone actually receives and decrypts our message," said Robert Lodder, an astrobiologist and specialist at the SETI extraterrestrial Intelligence search organization.

The project to advertise Earth for aliens was prepared by the Lexington VisitLEX tourism promotion team at the city administration and the Cornett advertising agency.