On August 22, 1924, the Earth was 55,777,566 km from the Red Planet during the Mars opposition, offering ideal conditions for receiving radio signals from Mars — if anyone happened to be sending them. Amherst College professor David Todd persuaded both the US Army and Navy to listen for messages from Mars. In the telegram above, Edward W. Eberle, the Chief of US Naval Operations, informs Naval stations of the possibility of Martian communications, and instructs them to report any unusual phenomena. For three days, the stations listened for unusual transmissions, but came up empty handed.

[Letters of Note]

Jeffrey Lockwood, who teaches the course, plans to discuss the resulting works at this September’s SETI conference, “Searching for Life Signatures.” The students, some of whom are Wyoming natives, come from a variety of educational backgrounds, which have influenced their responses to the assignments:

Christine Ingoglia, a graduate student who entered the university's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing in the Fall of 2007, started with a basic description of our appearance: "We look like — two arms, two legs, head, torso, symmetrical." Similarly, fellow MFA student Meagan Ciesla's summary — "We need food, air, water, and think we're the most intelligent" — was reminiscent of a message transmitted from the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974, which described the chemical basis of life on Earth, and showed a picture of only one terrestrial species: Homo sapiens.

Other messages penned that first day of class in Laramie were more philosophical. "We are an adolescent species searching for our identity," wrote Ann Stebner, a senior English major completing a minor in Environmental Values. "We know our species' origins," wrote senior psychology major Dana Rinne, "but we fear individual deaths." Rinne, who plans to do graduate work in social psychology or cognitive psychology, described the course as an opportunity to contemplate the intersection of philosophy, science, and mind.

Plenty of schools offer courses in extraterrestrial life, and a few even have burgeoning futurology programs. But with xenocommunications entering the course catalog, can we expect more courses on how to engage the future? Could transhuman studies be next in the curriculum?

Writing for an Extraterrestrial Audience [LiveScience]