This is the Technical Difficulties. We're playing Citation Needed.
Joining me in the studio today: he reads books, you know — it's Chris Joel!
He gets another shot!
Everybody's favourite Gary Brannan — Gary Brannan!
Three! Four! Nine! All of these are numbers.
And the bounciest man on the internet — Matt Gray!
Welcome YouTube!
In front of me I have an article from Wikipedia and these folks can't see it.
Every fact they get right is a point and a ding [DING],
and there's a special prize for particularly good answers, which is:
Today's article is: A Message From Earth.
A message from Eeearth.
What, like from Flash Gordon?
That's how you pronounced 'Eeearth'.
That's how it should be pronounced!
I've got the horrible feeling that in millions of years to come,
we'll work out we've been saying it wrong all this time and it should be pronounced:
Eeearth.
Is it anything to do with Voyager?
Well... it's the same kind of thing.
Is it 'Your call is important to us...'?
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
'If you are a hostile alien species, please press 2 to be reacted to with nuclear missiles.'
'Please note that Earth is only open between 9 and 5.'
'Nine to five what? I have been travelling for parsecs!'
Obscure Star Wars reference! Nice.
GARY: It's truth though, innit.
Anyway, we've got an alien death fleet round the back that's on hold.
Is it something to do with a probe we've sent out?
Not particularly a probe.
Is it fictional?
No, it's entirely real.
It's about... let's see.
Can I have a punt at this?
TOM: Yeah. I'll tell you it's about six light-years away right now.
Oh s***, I'm wrong then.
Why, what were you going for?
I was going to say it's the tune that Blur did that landed on the Moon... on, erm...
Beagle 2.
GARY: ...on Mars with Beagle 2.
It didn't land — well, it did land!
GARY and MATT: It landed!
It landed at high velocity!
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
Downwards.
I know there's a thin line between 'landing' and 'impact', but...
I tell that to the wife all the time.
But it's somewhere on Mars, regrettably, is a Blur CD.
In many different pieces.
MATT: I might have a go at the answer. TOM: Yeah, go for it.
Is it about how far our earliest radio transmissions have got out to space?
Not at six light-years, it's not.
Just spare a thought for that.
They're going to get all the crap early stuff first, aren't they?
As we did.
It's a bit further back from earliest messages,
and it's certainly a bit too far for a probe to have got.
This is a transmission?
It's a transmission. [DING]
And did someone just broadcast, 'Hey, is anyone listening?'
Not entirely. I'll give you the point, it's a transmission...
specifically one transmitted from an Earth station
belonging to the Ukraine national space agency,
which I can only assume has had some budget cuts recently.
Ooo.
But yes, it was transmitted on October 2008.
Oh really?
Hence the reason it is about six light-years away.
Please tell me it is just someone tapping a microphone and going, 'Is this thing on?'
Well, it sort of is.
It's meant to go about twenty light-years in total.
Have they found somewhere specific that they're sending it?
Yes. Any ideas what that might be?
An M-class planet!
Ooh, you know what, you can have a point. [DING]
It's not M-class, we haven't found one of those yet,
but it is a good candidate for being a close thing for where there might be life.
Gliese 581 c.
It's what I was just going to say.
Yeaaah, beaten to it again.
And it's all said because they're expecting everyone there to be completely gleeful.
GARY: Aww. Wouldn't that be nice?
If some alien death battlefleet turned up,
but it had a really nice name, it'd put you off, wouldn't it?
Put you off what? Dying?
No, how you would react.
You know, if they were like the Third Warfleet of the K'Flaarghs, you would step back a bit.
GARY: But if they were... TOM: The Gleezins.
'We are the Glee People!'
'Ah! That's nice.'
'In our world, this is bad!'
I'm just thinking of militarized Powerpuff Girls right now.
It will reach there in about 2029.
If we hear anything back, it'll presumably be about 2050.
After they've had time to work out what on earth we've sent them.
Do you know what I really want the message to be?
Comes back 2050 — the little printer or whatever that's there to record this for posterity...
Yeah, you know, because it's that sort of thing,
it's going to be a sci-fi film, it's still going to be a dot-matrix printer.
Yeah. It's printing it off bit by bit, and they pick it up, they tear it off...
And they hold it up, and it just says, "WHAT?"
That would be an entirely perfect response for this.
Because 501 messages were actually included.
How did they pick which ones to send?
Well, the one we sent had a rickroll in it.
Oh. You know what...
I was just going to say, YouTube views.
I'm going to give Gary the point...
Oh shut up!
Because it was the internet. [DING]
We sent them the internet?
No, we sent them 501 messages selected by popular vote from the internet.
Porn, porn, porn, kittens, 'Good afternoon Sir/Madam, I have a fantastic opportunity for you.'
Not at random. There was a public vote, so I can only assume...
...it was fixed by 4chan and Reddit.
Yeah.
Not 4chan, not Reddit... Which social network did they use to put the time capsule together?
Oh, please not Twitter.
Google+. There was one vote in total.
Not quite, but you're close.
MATT: Orkut.
Oh... not quite that obscure.
Tinder.
Tinder wasn't around then.
Tinder: 'No... No... No... No...'
Then a picture of a lizard comes up. 'Swipe left...'
You know how Tinder works?
CHRIS: That's very interesting! GARY: Everyone knows how...!
That's a point... You're married, Brannan.
How do I know how Tinder works? I live in the same world you do and I read newspapers.
TOM: Yes, that's fair. MATT: I don't know how Tinder works.
I don't know how Tinder works!
Just aware, boys. I've not used it.
This is one of these things where you try and defend yourself and it just sounds worse, doesn't it.
ALL: Yep. CHRIS: Stop digging, old boy.
Anyway, yes. What did we use?
Bebo.
Whoa!
I have never even heard of this thing.
Does someone want to explain Bebo to Chris?
Hard, really, but...
You know MySpace?
Faintly, yeah.
It's what the people that were younger than us used when MySpace wasn't cool enough.
But it's worse.
Okay.
I'm trying to think who the popular boy band of the day would be.
Because we're just sending all that, aren't we.
I can tell you, because they were involved in the project.
Oh s***. Jonas Brothers or One Direction?
MATT: No, that was a bit before.
TOM: No, no. You're too early for that.
What date are we saying again?
TOM: 2008. GARY: 8? Oh God, I've no idea.
I'll tell you, they're still going.
British or elsewhere?
British. It was Bebo. Bebo's a British network.
McFly.
GARY: Ohhh. MATT: Really!
McFly were involved. Along with Deborah Meaden from Dragons' Den...
Off of Dragons' Den.
And Gillian Anderson off of The X-Files. Because presumably...
Space!
We are sending mixed messages here, people.
We have this much publicity budget... this is who we can get.
Ha! That's what came first is the money, isn't it.
Who would we put up front now? I mean, Hawking obviously...
Yeah, if we need an ambassador... ungh!
Brian f***ing Cox.
Oh no... I'd hope they *were* the angry ones, just because they'd fire at him first.
What's the dislike for Brian Cox?
It's not a dislike, it's just the use of him for anything scientific.
CHRIS: That's true, yeah. TOM: That's fair.
I'm being controversial, I'm putting Noel Edmonds up there.
What! Why?
Consistent master of ceremonies.
He can anchor any show, no matter what's going wrong.
In the old days, I'd have stuck Monkhouse in.
Did you ever *hear* of Noel's HQ?
Yeah... this is true.
The man believes in cosmic ordering.
I'm not putting him out as ambassador for Earth.
You're making some good points here, yeah...
I was thinking from the consistent broadcasting point of view,
that if anything went wrong, he'd probably be able to keep a show going.
Oh no, if you're doing that — Davina McCall.
Ohhh.
Davina McCall can hold a show down, no matter what's going wrong around her.
You're forgetting something here. This isn't television, this is meeting an alien death fleet.
TOM: Ah. Fair.
I'm assuming telly's going to be there.
Oh! Then Morgan Freeman, obviously.
Ahh! Well yeah, of course.
There's one for the Americans to know what we're talking about. You've heard of Morgan Freeman.
Morgan Freeman. We're sending him and Stephen Hawking in.
TOM: Yeah. CHRIS: Yeah, all right.
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
It's sending God and science, isn't it?
Yeah! That's all it is... we've got both bases covered!
Alien death fleet's going to negotiate with them!
Morgan Freeman could come up with some kind of homespun philosophy
when things are getting quite tense.
Please invade. Take me away from all this.
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
Anyway, the Message From Earth has got the McFlies on it?
Yes, it has, erm...
The McFlies!
As I believe they're called.
Oh dear.
We've got the McFlies.
501 messages included. One was chosen to illustrate evil.
'This is a party political broadcast by the Conservative Party.'
Oh, you know what — you are so close.
F*** off!
2008, who would you pick to be the epitome of evil?
GARY: Oh! Dubya! TOM: Dubya. [DING]
Nooo! [Laughter]
So it's now out of date even though it's within...
It is entirely out of date, despite the fact it is currently about...
About a third of the way to a planet about twenty light-years away.
'We have come to rid of your great evil, Dubya Bush.'
Yep.
I've just thought. The best thing is, when the response comes back,
no one's going to know what they're responding to, because everyone will have forgotten it happened.
One message says that the best thing about Earth is George Sampson.
Who no one will remember even in Britain...
Oh hang on, let me have a go...
CHRIS: I remember the name... MATT: I know that name.
George Sampson. Was he on... a talent show?
He was on Britain's Got Talent. He was the kid dancer.
He was a dancer, wasn't he?
Yeah. That message is going through interstellar space right now, aimed at a planet.
D'you know, all that philosophy and engineering and writing and discovery...
F*** it. Dancing eight-year-old.
Yeah.
But the best thing is, he was probably cool with that,
because he knows if a message comes back in the affirmative,
saying, 'Tell us more of these George Sampsons!' He's like: 'Career's back.'
TOM: Yeah, that's true.
It's better than what I thought you said. I thought you said Daz Sampson.
Ohhh.
Ooo.
Oooo.
That's a reference that Americans shouldn't Google.
Don't. Do. Depends what you like, really.
Yeah.
I'm certainly not going to. I don't know what they're on about.
I mean... this is blatantly a publicity stunt.
What we have essentially done is spammed a planet twenty light-years away with an ad for Bebo.
We haven't spammed a planet. We have spammed an entire section of space.
A swath of space that the radio...
You can't pinpoint this s***.
No, you can't. Even a laser beam pointed at a planet would be so wide...
Oh yeah. Vast diffusion by the time you... yeah.
What if — can you imagine the opposite?
That we receive a message that we can't decode or understand,
because it's come from the depths of space.
We would go absolutely apes*** for something like that.
We would.
They're going to be doing something similar, you know, and we get it...
Finally, whatever-the-race-is finally lands and goes,
'Ah, yes. He won one of our talent shows seventy years ago.'
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
I mean, we'd treat it as...
Imagine if some alien culture sent a similar message to us.
We couldn't decode it.
We would have our best cryptographers trying to work out...
We really would! We'd be trying to point out,
It's directions, or it's scientific information or something.
And all we've done is sent bloody McFly's friggin' shoe size.
Not their shoe size... Does anyone want to say what they were...?
Greatest fears and times they were out of the house.
Did it list the five colours of her hair?
It was in praise of someone else. Another woman.
Oh, that song about the teacher?
No... that was Busted.
They sent a message in praise of Cheryl Cole.
F***.
In praise of a woman who punched a toilet attendant.
Yup. The transmission took four and a half hours, by the way.
We used a radio telescope, one of the greatest scientific achievements in the world,
for four and a half hours, to send this thing.
Yeah, again... planet in the distance is sending a message:
'We shall do this! We have locked onto a signal!'
'Transmit the message!'
I can see him there in his big cape and everything, in his gigantic space palace...
Yeah. Again, you're on Ming the Merciless here.
Well, everyone in space looks like that. That's been well established.
Obviously, yeah.
'Transmit the message!'
Doot... doot... coming up 'Engaged'.
There is another message about a year after it,
sent by a completely different group.
They targeted this message at literally the same solar system.
'Please delete your voice mails, don't listen to any more, just delete it!'
Essentially, yes.
Was it UKIP?
Oh, God! Nigel Farage in space...
'No, no. Let me speak!'
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
Just without a suit. Just Nigel Farage in space.
No spacesuit, no nothing...
I've got him in a tweed spacesuit...
Oh God, the UKIP Space Agency...
He's got a special kind of space agency-designed glass
that's still got a pint in that he can still suck in.
And a hole for a fag.
And this one was 2.8 megabytes of messages,
which they just accepted everything sent in to their website.
GARY: Uh-oh...
MATT: Text?
Text, yes.
Have we just intergalactically potentially sexted?
Ooo. Ooh, I don't know.
'What do they mean, what am I wearing?' [Laughter]
'The same thing I always wear! A cape!'
'A giant cape! And a long, swishy set of gloves!
'And a very neatly trimmed beard!'
TOM: What I love is that the... the...
CHRIS: 'I am Ming the Merciless!'
GARY: 'And my hands are wet!'
'Why does no one have a towel on Mongo?!'
MATT: 'This one is wet...' GARY: 'This one is wet.'
Other messages, then. We have loads of them.
It turns out, having looked through the wider articles,
there are quite a lot of messages we've sent to various places over the years.
One of the earliest messages that went out was the Teen Age Message, which was from Russia in 2001.
It included a live performance of music.
And they just plugged the instrument effectively straight into the radio telescope.
What instrument did they plug in that could send coherent sound?
Melodion.
A zither.
Theremin.
TOM: Yes! [DING] GARY: Nooo!
And in fact...
Can you get a more mysterious space music than that?
Making space noises into space.
[Theremin sounds] Wooooo...
Yep. First theremin concert for extraterrestrials.
Can we just end it on 'first theremin concert'?
'Man Found To Own Theremin.'
I got to play a theremin a little while ago.
It's really difficult!
Bloody difficult, yeah.
Even if you forget the whole volume thing, the trying to find a note is just...
Why a theremin?
Well, it just f***ing sounds like space, doesn't it?
GARY: Yeah!
It's a constant sine wave.
Like, it sounds like a coherent message, rather than noise...
Again, someone outside the Earth is doing this to us, and we're trying to decode it here...
'What could this mysterious message mean?' Not realizing it's f***in'...
Woooo... 'Oh God, Doctor Who's coming.'
It's the opening bars to, I don't know, McFly, played on a friggin' theremin.
They actually did go for Russian folk songs and classical music there, so...
Have we Trololo-led the universe on a theremin?
Yes we have. Yep.
['Trololo' melody] Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo... woo-oo-oo...
So you know all those arguments about how we shouldn't send signals out there,
in case a hostile civilisation detects us...
Yeah.
Yeah, too late. Bebo got there first.
Oh, bollocks.
Well, hopefully they'll just pass us by, based on what we've sent out.
'They are not worth the trouble! They cannot dry my flappy gloves!'
'And our lack of towels!'
There is one other thing — one other message, sent in 2012, that I want to talk about...
which was three transmissions to three stars in a very specific bit of space.
'Oh, he said you...'
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
'You and you, fight!' Yeah.
No... which was a reply.
What was it a reply to?
Is it one of these mysterious sort of 'thunks' that comes from space or...
Yep. [DING] Have a point.
Anyone remember the name of it? The really big signal...
'Wow!'
[DING] Point. The 'Wow!' signal.
The guy circled it in red pen and put 'Wow!' next to it, and that's it.
Yeah. It matches the expected signature of an interstellar signal perfectly.
Never been seen again.
Could have been a freak event.
Did they decode it to 'Air Hostess' by McFly?
Again — Busted. But we'll let you have it.
McFly / Busted. Yeah.
What we need is a loud noise that goes into space, that's recognizable...
That just picks up that 'Wow!' spike...
So I am up for sticking Brian Blessed on top of Everest, with an alphorn.
Yep. Okay, good.
Why are we not just sending big old spikes of solid pitch?
Because if they're looking in the same way we are, and all they're getting is a spike...
What we need to send is:
['Shave and a haircut' rhythm] Boop boop-boop boop boop...
Yes! Absolutely!
That has got to be universal — yeah, absolutely.
That is universal! If nothing else, the 'shave and a haircut' knock up there...
'Shave and a haircut — shave and a haircut — shave and a haircut —'
'Bomp bomp.' 'Bomp bomp!'
'Holy f***!'
Both ends simultaneously realize we've been working together, it's the grounds for peace, it's fine...
everybody sits down, watches Roger Rabbit, hates Christopher Lloyd's character, it's fine. Galactic peace.
That's it. We've solved the world's problems.
That's it. Intergalactic peace is inevitable.
Right! Curry then, chaps.
Yep! We're all done. At the end of that show, congratulations Chris, you win this one.
You win a year's supply of AA batteries, courtesy of He-Man's new company.
The Power of Grayskull.
Cool!
Best one yet.
Thank you very much to Chris Joel!
Winning!
TOM: To Gary Brannan... GARY: Felicitations.
TOM: To Matt Gray... MATT: Bye-bye.
I've been Tom Scott, and we'll see you next time.
What, has Ming the Merciless got designs on Scarborough as well?
Some hot hail would tidy the place right up.
ALL: Oooo.
GARY: That sounds highbrow and commemorative.
As opposed to lowbrow and commemorative.
Lowbrow commemoration!
'Dave's dead!' [Laughter]
'Back down t' pit!'
'We're commemorating this with a giant brass arse!'
Is this something like Fish-Slapping Dance?
ALL: Ohh...
With a side o' bacon...
Bacon beating!
Brannan, if you'd care to mime with me...
Go on.
Comme ça?