The first message bashed out on our vintage Underwood typewriter, pinned to the sparkly silver message board, set the tone:

“Beware of bears. Send food and supplies. Xo”

Most that followed struck the same chord.

“We are here and we are having fun. Come and join us, come and join us, now.”

“So here we are, trying to talk to you, but you never call or write, what is that all about?”

Some chimed more in tune with current Zeitgeist.

“Are there any jobs out in space??? I am looking for work.”

Quite a few discussed (and apologised for) what’s on the telly.

“Hullo, Hope you’re well. Maybe you’ve seen some previous transmissions from our planet. Just to say, please don’t judge us too harshly for Hollyoaks. Many of us hate it. Ta muchly. Jim.”

“If Jeremy Kyle is your first experience of Earth, I am not sorry! We are not all crazy, I promise! ☺”

And a few were far from frivolous.

“Mum. I hope you are looking down on me.”

Each of the 47 messages left by our guests at the Astronomers’ Ball at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich said something, in its way, about the very odd thing that is the human condition. And every one will be sent into deep space from a parabolic dish antenna in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Using satellite broadcasting equipment with redundant high-powered klystron amplifiers connected by a traveling wave-guide to a five-meter parabolic dish antenna, owned and operated by the Deep Space Communications Network, these messages will travel for four years from Earth at a frequency of around 6,250 MHz.

Professor Izzat Darwazeh, head of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, donned his suit and tie, and joined us to explain to our costumed guests how radio waves will carry their messages into the deep unknown.

“What I found most fascinating is how interested people were. Astronomy itself is interesting to most people – but people were asking in general about my work, and about what do we do in communications engineering.” he says. “People from non-scientific backgrounds were asking quite sensible questions: ‘How could you send a message so far? Will these messages get anywhere? Would these be sent direct or through another mode? When might we get a message back?’” he says.

What would you say if you had one chance to speak to the stars? We still have plenty of space in the package that we will send out: email your thoughts to zoe@guerillascience.co.uk and we will add them to our interstellar chatter.

Remember, this is for posterity, so be honest. Those messages kept to a succinct 140 characters or less will be re-broadcast on our terrestrial Twitter feed. If so inclined, please record your microblog moniker with your note – who knows, our galactic followers may receive it. Alternatively, you can send us an illustration, as a few at the Astronomers’ Ball chose to. Or – if you are feeling extra communicative – you can send us a short video less than 20 seconds in length.

Will our message reach a receptive audience? And might we get a reply?

Almost certainly absolutely not. The sheer size of space, and the distance between the stars, reduces the chance of making contact to virtually zero.

Yet could there be intelligent civilizations out there – even some with the right equipment? Almost certainly absolutely yes.

As Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research (and the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in Carl Sagan’s Contact) argues in her TED talk, the number of stars that we have inspected, compared to all the lights in the universe, is equivalent to a glass of water in the sea. “And nobody would decide the ocean was devoid of fish on the basis of a single glass of water,” she says.

SETI, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence, has scoured the skies with radio telescopes for four decades, listening for signs of life – more precisely, the electronmagnetic transmissions that would be given off by a species with technological capacities like our own.

There have been some false positives: when the first pulsar was discovered in 1967 (the year of the summer of love no less), its rhythmic trills sounded so regular, astronomers concluded that it must have been created by artificial means fashioned by intelligent beings, and the cluster was deemed LGM – for little green men. You can hear it on the 8th track of the Guerilla Science Sounds of the Stars audio tour here.

But despite hope, and false hopes, all our listening has turned up nothing. But then, who are we to complain that the phone never rings, unless we dial up the networks ourselves? Contact will never be made if everyone simply listens.

The first deliberate attempt to shout a message to the stars took place exactly 37 years ago today, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, aimed at the M13 globular star cluster more than 25,000 light years away. This is still the strongest signal we have ever broadcast to space.

What on earth is a species to say in its first shout out to the stars? And in what language?

The now famous Drake message, crafted by astronomer Frank Drake with advice from science fiction writer Carl Sagan (author of Contact), went with the basics: the numbers 1 to 10, a graphic figure of our solar system, an outline of a human figure, chemical denotation of the elements that make up DNA, and so on – seven pieces of basic information to give a snapshot of our planet. Binary was the chosen tongue, because it lends itself easily to encoding: shifting the frequency of the signal up or down a notch could denote 1 or 0.

Exactly 1679 bursts of noise were broadcast – the number 1679 chosen because it is a semiprime number, the product of 73 by 23, which can be arranged into a rectangle to create the image.

This, our first message, will reach it’s target in 25,000 years – if received, and if a reply is made, we will not hear back for 50,000 years. Responders would need to not only have the equipment to receive the signal, they would also need to speak binary,and have the intuition to turn the 1679 notes into a grid. Not surprisingly, the intention was to demonstrate the technological sophistication of the equipment, rather than an earnest effort to make contact.

Symbolic or not, this was not to be the last snapshot of life on earth sent to intergalactic receivers: five years later the Voyager probes launched into space, with a more low-fi (and easily decoded) mode of delivery. It carries with it still a golden record of sounds and images of life on our planet, including whalesong and Mozart, Chuck Berry and string quartets, pictures of frogs, leaves, snowflakes, airplanes, people eating cheeseburgers, the moon, and this very famous image of a man and woman saying a friendly hello with a graphic of the origin of the probe – the third satellite from the sun.

This image, in fact, annoyed many representatives of half the human population: it is the male who waves, as though his status as interstellar ambassador is a given.

The female form however provides the first piece of information that finally reached another star: the sounds of vaginal contractions reached Epsilon Eridani in 1996. These were recorded and broadcast in 1986 by artist Joe Davis, who felt that all previous messages sent to space lacked depictions of human reproduction, and thus failed to really portray the human condition. These sounds, he felt, would best portray the essence of our species.

“If anything is going to inspire an alien civilisation to come running, surely that would be it,” noted Pigalle Tavakkoli of Contemporary Vintage, our guest that night.

There have been other attempts to craft universal messages. The “Cosmic Calls” in 1999 and 2003, sent from the Ukraine, broadcast what is known as the Interstellar Rosetta Stone – similar to the Arecibo message, but much larger, depicting the chemistry of DNA, the geology of the Earth, and basic mathematical principles. In 2009 Joe Davis broadcast the code for RuBisCo – the plant enzyme responsible for photosynthesis, and the most abundant protein on earth; not as salacious as the sounds of a ballerina’s vagina, but certainly an admissible ambassador for life on earth.

Some messages have been less philosophical: in 2008 Doritos broadcast a commercial for its nachos towards Ursae Majoris, the winning entry to an open contest for amateur filmmakers. The first ad sent to space, a stop-motion film of nacho chips performing a satanic ritual is, actually, rather impressive.

Nacho chips, prime numbers, plant enzymes and audible vaginas aside – is there any point in broadcasting our message to space? Many scientists would argue that it is a waste of time and energy. Others would go so far as to say that it is outright reckless, most notably Dr Stephen Hawking (a scientist so serious we might never expect him to turn his mind upon this subject). He very rationally argues that any civilization with the capacity to receive, interpret and respond to our messages will undoubtedly be far more powerful and advanced than our own – and likely to come here at all speed to harvest our resources. We might as well tweet “come and get us” into space.

But, the point remains: contact will never be made if we only listen. As Jill Tarter of SETI counter-argues: if there is intelligent life out there, and if we have the capacity to speak to them, we have a moral obligation to let them know that they are not alone.

WALL OF DEATH. WALL OF DEATH. WALL OF DEATH.

The first time I glimpsed the Wall Of Death, it was packed down and bundled up into the back of a flat bed truck, heading out slowly through a parking lot (field) at Glastonbury, my first festival of the season. A group of random people, lying on the grass by their car, exhausted, hungover and delaying the drive home (as you do), immediately leapt to their feet and began chanting its name.

WALL OF DEATH. WALL OF DEATH. WALL OF DEATH.

The truck honked in response, and the entire field sent up a roaring cheer.

Shivers of goosebumps crossed my skin. Why – why oh why? – had I not seen it when I had the chance? This is what Entertainment is all about: irrational, hazardous spectacles combining modern engineering with physical prowess.

Little did I know I would have another opportunity, at Bestival three months later, my last festival of the season.

Best moment: When the leader of the troupe explains that they rely on coin donations to pay for their operations (and attendant medical costs) because no insurance company will cover them.

My favourite touch: The demure looks of the girls. With simple bangs (that’s “fringe” to you Brits), unadorned faces and modest clothes, they don’t look anything like you’d expect acrobatic, death-defying, motorcycle stunt chicks to. Somehow, it renders them even more badass.

My colleague and friend Steve Mould – who is a professional physics communicator and thinks our understanding of quantum processes is one of humanity’s greatest achievements – astutely observed that I hate it because I don’t understand it.

This is absolutely true. Quantum physics defies the conceptual limits of the human brain and our capacity to understand our universe. It hurts my head. The science that sets my soul on fire is biological: genetics, cellular biology, anatomy, and the like. Though staggeringly complex, the machinations of the cell are not conceptually challenging to comprehend: if you can understand Lego, you can basically grasp how DNA works. We can even make pretty animations like this rad one by PBS to illustrate the process of DNA transcription, though it boggles the mind to hold all the thousands of molecular players in our mental frame at once.

But quantum physics is an all together different beast. It defies comprehension, and messes with all our cognitive norms. It makes me dizzy. I’m sorry – what was that? Light is both a particle and a wave? That does not make sense. Jerk.

Steve tried to explain Schroedinger’s Cat, one of the most famous ideas in quantum mechanics, to a psychiatrist at one of our Guerilla Science events. “What, that stupid dead cat in a box thing?” I asked. Upon reflection, I’m very fond of this definition.

Despite all my prejudices and fears however, I could not help but find myself utterly charmed last night at a London Design Festival event by The Quantum Parallelograph, a piece of art described by its designer Patrick Stevenson-Keating as “an exploratory public engagement project examining the scientific and philosophical ideas surrounding the theory of quantum physics and multiple universes”. Keating is a designer, but (like the best designers) has based his work on the research of scientists – Professor David Deutsch of Oxford University, and before him, Professor Hugh Everett.

Photo courtesy of Patrick Stevenson-Keating.

The idea: use the machine for a quick glimpse at what another you is doing, right this moment, in a parallel universe.

The process: type your name into the attached computer (not pictured), and tell it how you are feeling right now. Then use the Search Intensity Field dial on the Parallelograph to determine how far from our current reality you would like to peer – would you like to see a world in which your life is very similar to the one you live now, or very different?

Photo courtesy of Patrick Stevenson-Keating.

When a photon of light from a laser is shone through a pair of slits, research apparently suggests that it can travel through both openings – and thus perform some kind of quantum malarky, interacting with its parallel photonic self in another universe, forging a connection between worlds. The result: a fleeting glimpse at what another you is up to, printed out on a friendly piece of pink receipt paper (complete with classic courier font).

Photo courtesy of Patrick Stevenson-Keating.

My own self, somewhere in another universe, as predicted by the Parallelograph when set to Search Intensity Level 5:

The parallel lives of: Zoe Cormier

Authorised by: PSK

Date in current universe: 21/09/2011

Connection opened at: Wed 21:00:18

Disconnected at: Wed 21:00:18 +0.00021sec

Observe your life in Universe No: 22860

Disciplinary action is being taken against Zoe Cormier 
after accidentally destroying Pluto. Although an easy 
mistake to make, a fine is the most likely outcome.

That’s a relief then – wouldn’t want to be incarcerated for blowing up what is, after all, not even a planet.

What would I be doing then in a universe similar to this one? I set the Intensity Level to 1:

Zoe Cormier is a middle management employee at Suds 
and Co. soap company. Zoe Cormier enjoys their work, 
especially the free samples of their new products.

I couldn’t even make reading aloud through the whole word “management” without laughing, by the by. The banality of this prediction is somehow sublime.

Many of us, like me, find quantum mechanics intimidating not because we find it conceptually challenging, but because it poses “the uneasy question of our own uniqueness”, thinks PSK.

“How far from your current reality do you risk going? When you use the quantum  parallelograph to glimpse your many worlds, you may not always like what you see.” True say. When my friend, a solar panel installation engineer, found that in another universe he has been locked up for theft, we all agreed: that’s not surprising. Our reaction in itself may have been illuminating.

This comes to another reason I’m not fond of quantum mechanics: the implications are terrifying. An infinite number of possible universes? Egad. I’m finding one universe hard enough to contemplate, let alone several (and don’t get me started on how much I hate the concept of infinity – it scares the bejesus out of me). PSK has thoughts on this too:

“Curiosity can be a dangerously obsessive trait – do not get lost in the multiverse.”

The Quantum Parallelograph from Patrick Stevenson-Keating on Vimeo.

Get to work.

Burning Man is crawling with “art cars”, or “mutant vehicles” – autos and trucks transformed into fish, robots and pirate ships. Some of them are pretty fucking impressive – giant two-storey crawling Pez dispensers (yes really) would astound the crap out of anyone.

But, after a while, the neon lights and the fairy dust do become a bit much – you get a bit tired of pink fluffy cat-unicorns.

Maybe it’s the heat and the sleep deprivation making you a bit crabby. Maybe it’s the sensory overload, and the desire for something achingly normal.

Whatever it is, there is a hefty dose of sheer genius in Driven By Profit – a mobile boardroom for all your corporate conference needs. A white board, overhead projector, chintzy mugs, official company logo and strict dress code made for an irrefutably brilliant result.

Plus, of course, megaphones.

Make me some coffee.

“Mushrooms are up, dignity is down – buy low sell high.”

“How is the blinky lights versus baby wipes index doing?”

“Hey sugar tits, get me some coffee.”

“Time is money – get a shirt, get a job.”

“Can somebody turn up the air con please.”

Perhaps most sublime was the reactions of the hippies who didn’t get the satire. “Hey man, this isn’t what the Burn is about – go back to babylon.”

A few, I’m told, even picked fights. Genius.

I never wanted to get off.

Working overtime.

I did not expect to be deemed less attractive than an orang-utan.

“You will never live this down,” my best friend grinned.

The things we do for science.

At the Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party with my side project Guerilla Science this past July, we presented our audience with an array of human scents for them to sample, judge and rate: two boys, a woman (myself), and an ape (Hannah, a female orang-utan, only revealed to be non-human after the judging).

More than 50 eager noses took turns sniffing our Smell Stations, plastic boxes containing ripped shreds of fabric from t-shirts worn by our four research subjects.

This was a Guerilla Science take on the famous t-shirt experiments, which investigate the molecular basis of attraction and by examining how humans preferentially rate the smells of other people.

“We humans usually think that we pick our mates according to how they look – we think of ‘love at first sight’ – we don’t appreciate the importance of smell,” says Dr Leslie Knapp, a biological anthropologist who specialises in immunogenetics at the University of Cambridge and a global authority on the relationship between smell and attraction in primates. “But studies of primates and even studies of humans have shown that our ability to smell is very important, even in present day society – how we perceive the smell of someone has an influence on how we react to them, and there is good evidence to suggest that it has important influences on how we choose our mates.”

Anyone who has ever known the smell of a lover may be able to relate: the scent of that certain someone is utterly distinct, wholly individual, and – when it belongs to the right person – completely intoxicating. Once upon a time, it was the smell of someone that lay in the crease between his nose and his face that made me weak in the knees.

The mysterious charm and allure of a particular person’s scent is seemingly impossible to put into words, though a few have uttered some rather poignant phrases: Napoleon is reputed to have written to Josephine, “Will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”

Canadian gay gospel outfit The Hidden Cameras croon in The Smell of Happiness, from the album The Smell Of Our Own, “Happiness has a smell I inhale… I feed my own face when I soon crave a taste of the neck of a boy.” The rest, um, gets a bit dirty – read full lyrics here.

The influence of smell over our hearts and our bodies is undeniable, if you have ever felt that way, and yet exactly why seems mysterious: why should one person smell so sweet?

Scientific research, wielding the modern tools of genetic analysis, has uncovered some fascinating clues. Remarkably, studies have shown that our preferences for smells are partly determined by subconscious genetic cues. The same genes that seem to influence how we smell – known as the “MHC cluster” in animals and the “HLA” in humans – also play a key role in programming how our immune systems operate by determining what innate and individual disease resistances we all possess.

Lab animals as well as people will preferentially chose mates who possess MHC clusters that are different from their own, which most scientists believe acts as a subconscious mechanism that protects against inbreeding, as well as confers a greater spread of protection to their children.

Dr Knapp’s own research on mandrills has demonstrated that individuals will use smell to “identify potential partners with the appropriate genes,” as she puts it.

In humans, some fascinating studies (such as this one) have found that when women are shown photographs of men and given a selection of smell samples from the same men (though without knowing which smell belonged to which man), their choices frequently matched: the scents they deemed sexy often came from faces they declared handsome. Remarkable.

In the spirit of renegade research, we decided to conduct our own investigation into the relationship between smell and attraction, asking our audience to judge the smells of our contestants with a Feast of Stenches at the Secret Garden Party, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust as part of their Dirt season of events.

We gave things a twist, as we are wont to do. We threw a non-human – the orangutan Hannah – into the mix, without telling our unwitting judges.

To thicken the plot (or at least, their odours), we had our two male subjects go without washing for forty days and forty nights in the run-up to the festival, in a Smelly Tweeter competition.

For the chance to win a ticket to the Secret Garden Party, we asked contestants to attempt to last 40 days without soap and water, and tweet daily about their experience of being physically filthy, the reactions of those around them to their odiferous state, how being dirty makes them feel, and their reasons to quit the contest should they choose to drop out.

You can see all the tweets from contestants on Twitter under the hashtag #smellytweet. Daniel, the champion, kept a detailed blog on his experiences – you can see a choice selection of his posts here: “I am sitting less than three metres from a bathtub. This is torture. I will persevere. I WILL persevere.”

Daniel bathing - at long last - at the Secret Garden Party.

Beyond having a good chuckle at their expense, we hoped to enrich our understanding of the cultural implications of dirt: “This will be something that no-one has ever done before – this is a totally unique experiment,” says Dr Knapp. “Humans usually try to cover up their natural odours, so we will be interested in the results.”

The audience’s first task was to guess the sex of each of the four stations using coloured beads to indicate male (blue) or female (pink). The overwhelming majority vote in every case was correct – most people could tell that Daniel and Jim are male, and Hannah and myself are female. (Somewhat humiliatingly, more people thought Hannah was female than thought I was female.)

Next we asked the audience to rate the four smells on a sliding scale of attractiveness. Daniel was deemed least attractive, Jim somewhat less so, followed by myself – and then Hannah, the orangutan, was declared the most pleasing. My friends said this would keep them in jokes for weeks to come (and that afternoon called their team in the pub quiz “ORANG-UTAN > ZOE”), but I query this conclusion: Hannah’s shirt smelled more like laundry detergent than any of ours, presumably because she did not have the patience to wear it for long. Had she kept it on her hairy form for as long as I did, I believe I would have won. But I digress.

Our last table featured strips from four shirts, all worn by Daniel, at various points during his 40 day soap fast. Unsurprisingly, the shirts worn at the later stages were deemed unbearably putrid.

But here’s where things get more interesting: Dr Knapp examined our DNA, extracted from mouth cheekswabs, and produced visual illustrations (in the form of a gel electrophoresis assay, which displays genetic variations in the form of bands) of our HLA genes. She also examined the DNA of Shamima, Daniel’s long-term girlfriend.

Unsurprisingly, Sham (who descends from both European and Asian parents) boasted diverse HLA genetics – Daniel, who’s lineage is largely Irish, possessed more homogenous genes, which might make him less immunologically robust and potentially more vulnerable to certain diseases than Sham.

But, amusingly, Sham deemed the smell of the other boy, Jim, to be more attractive than Daniel – and his genetics looked to be a better match if they were aiming for maximum HLA diversity, said Dr Knapp.

Of course, being social creatures who rely so much on language, and whose beliefs, desires and behaviours are largely governed by the cultures in which we live, we use far more than just smell to pick our partners. It certainly makes life more interesting.

But the results are certainly fascinating, nonetheless. And even if Hannah was deemed more attractive than me, I do take pride in having defeated the boys – even if they hadn’t bathed in 40 days.

He's a stinky bastard, but I love Daniel still.

The Decontamination Unit inside Shangri La – Glastonbury’s two-storey after-hours pleasure city of sin and sleaze – was by far the most ambitious event my side project Guerilla Science had ever attempted, and definitely the most experimental.

Hundreds of unwitting punters found themselves face-to-face with a zoo of their own bacteria.

Then counseled by a team of bona fide psychiatrists. It was intense.

Read more about the Unit in my post for The Guardian, see more pics on the Guerilla Science flickr site, and get a feel for what it was like in this video by Oscar Sharpe for GS.

I can say without a moment’s hesitation that no group of scientists have ever attempted anything like this before.

I went out to Chiltern to have the kit put on, and then was sent back to London. I was not comfortable. The electrodes were secured to my head with firm glue. I looked a bit cyborgish. No fun

So I figured – why not make an outing of it so all my friends could come and marvel at my freakish state? Being English, of course they suggested we meet at the pub.

Measure this.

(And yes MOM, I asked the neurologist if it was ok – he said a few pints was fine, but not to get smashed.

Sitting outside the pub with this shit strapped to my head, my friends tittered and marveled. Then a bum came to ask for change. But when he saw the wires, he could only stare, and said “Oh my god… your head… do you need help?”

“Ah, no, I’m fine.”

“Really? Can I help you?”

“Ah no that’s kind, I have my friends with me.”

He wandered off, sad and confused.

In a way, it was incredibly touching.

Some of the most interesting ones come from my nutty family and my almost-as-nutty friends. For those of you unfortunate enough not to be my friend, here I re-post for your delectation.

“You fucking brat. You must have been an ugly, blind nun in your previous life.” Kelley Harron, my aunt, when I landed an awesome new gig

“Monogamy is my favourite form of sexual perversion.” Daniel Farrel, my friend

“You can’t give up drinking, Zoe, you’re a journalist – you’d be letting down your entire profession.” Peter Farrel, Daniel’s brother and also my friend

“If you don’t talk back to your parents they’ll never learn anything.” Martha Harron, my mother

“Reproduction is overrated.” Jordan Heath-Rawlings, my first love

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t fall in love with somebody who can’t write.” Marianne Vizinczey, my aunt

“All men are cowards.” Rory O’Brien, my friend

“Many of the best things I did in my life came from the spirit of “‘I’ll show you.’” Mary Harron, my aunt

“If you can make a modest living at something you love to do, you are one of the luckiest people in the world.” Don Harron, actor, writer, comedian, and my grandpa

“If smart women never slept with stupid assholes, half the planet wouldn’t be here.” Me, Zoe Cormier (Take that for good or bad, you pick.)

“From my own life what I most regret is the time I wasted giving in to despair. You are not entitled to despair.” Stephen Vizenczey, my step-grandfather

“One should never be afraid of being ridiculous – it is the only way to be free.” Stephen Vizinczey

Crazy house, crazy house, this is the awesome, mysterious crazy house.

It’s not far from the house where I grew up, but bizarrely, I didn’t discover it until a few years ago.

It is most sublime.

I’m not sure what the deal with it is – why? when? and for god’s sake, WHY?

I do know one thing: they cannot possibly be popular with the neighbours.

Over the eyeball, under the eyelid, and straight on till morning.

The London-based Secret Cinema creates homages to classic films: they take over abandoned buildings (in this case, a disused hospital) and recreate the set, with actors playing the roles, art installations celebrating the plot, live bands, bars and food. Punters spend two hours scrambling around the space getting sauced and getting in the spirit, before sitting down to watch the film.

My side project Guerilla Science, which brings scientific events into cultural spaces, hosted the Experimental Ward: psychiatric assessments, electroconvulsive treatments, and lobotomy lectures. Read more on our website in two extensive posts I wrote about the history and theory behind electroconvulsive therapy and the transorbital lobotomy – Neural Renovation and a kind of Surgery for the Soul, one could say.

Taking our place alongside bona fide actors and artists, we try to bring content with real historical and scientific meaning into what is essentially a theatrical performance. We think we don’t do too badly – our performances with OFOTCN saw us broadcast on Russian television. Not bad.

Truth be told, the whole experience made me lose my marbles just a little bit. Thinking about invasive and debilitating brain surgery inside an unheated building surrounded by dozens of actors playing mental patients can do that to a girl.