UPDATE Tuesday, Feb. 5
In one of those too-wierd-for-fiction [sic] coincidences, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru who famously introduced the Beatles and the Western world to transcendental meditation, and thus indirectly inspired the mantra-refrain of the song “Across the Universe,” which NASA beamed out into space on Monday, died on Tuesday. [at about 7 pm local time]. He was 91 and had been living in a small town in Holland.

Original post:

A NASA antenna at Fort Irwin, Calif.
(NASA photo)

If you’re out there in deep space, you’ll want to be tuning in at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, Feb. 4 (plus however long it takes electromagnetic radiation to reach you from Earth doing the 186,000-miles-a-second speed limit).

That’s when NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as it happens was mostly recorded exactly 40 years earlier, on Feb. 4, 1968.

Reception will be best in the general direction of Polaris, 431 lightyears away, which is where NASA is aiming the signal. (That would be the North Star to us laymen.) But it ought to be audible in plenty of places on Earth as well, at least by imitation: NASA is encouraging space fans and Beatle fans alike to play the song themselves at the same time.

NASA’s press release includes some perfectly in-character comments from Sir Paul McCartney (”Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.”) and from Yoko Ono, widow of John Lennon, the song’s main author (”I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”). Presumably, Julie Taymor will be pleased as well; her film “Across the Universe,” built around a soundtrack of Beatle songs, is still in theaters and contending for an Oscar; it is due for release on DVD on Tuesday.

The event also commemorates the 45th anniversary of the creation of the antenna system, the Deep Space Network, which NASA uses to explore space at one remove by listening to the electromagnetic radiation coming our way from Out There; the system also comes in handy for picking up data sent by space probes we have dispatched to the planets and beyond over the years.

NASA doesn’t often send outgoing mail this way; the last high-profile American broadcast meant specifically for extraterrestrial ears was also the first, dispatched by Professor Frank Drake of Cornell University in 1974 during the dedication of the upgraded Arecibo radiotelescope in Puerto Rico. (No reply, at least so far.) But Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute, which has been looking for signs of life beyond Earth since 1984, noted in an e-mail message to our colleague Dennis Overbye today that other groups in Ukraine and Canada have been sending signals in recent years.

Of course, vast amounts of electromagnetic signals flood out from the Earth every day as a side effect of ordinary human-to-human activity, from TV and radio broadcasts, radar stations, satellite uplinks and other sources, and the leading wave of that stuff has an eight-decade head start.

“Proof of our existence is already out there,” Dr. Shostak noted, “that’s simply a fact.”

An array of antennas that could pick up terrestrial TV signals in a distant solar system wouldn’t be hard to build, he observed. But there’s still plenty of time for any potential alien listener to tie-dye some T-shirts and stock the fridge before settling in to enjoy the song. Though scientists have found evidence of some 270 planets of other stars, most are extremely unlikely to support life, and all but a handful are far enough away that no readily detected, human-generated signal could yet have reached them.

“It’s safe to say that nobody knows of the existence of Homo sapiens (beyond this planet, of course),” Dr. Shostak observed.

A pity. The Lede was hoping for a little intergalactic help grokking that bit of Sanskrit in the chorus, “Jai guru deva om.”