There is only one work on the meaning and purpose of writing which I can recite by heart. I keep it nailed to my wall, and glance at it weekly.

It is a letter to me from Roald Dahl, replying to my fan mail, sent in 1990.

Roald Dahl died on the 23rd of November 1990 – less than two months after he sent this to me. Apparently he spent his dying days replying to his mountains of fan mail, because the impact that he had made on his readers truly did matter to him.

That is a lesson I never want to forget.

“It would be awesome to bring in some new ideas and theme the podcast around science!” said the ringleader, Dan Garber, referring to my double-life as a science writer and Guerilla Scientist.

“Sure we could do a science podcast – or you guys could just make dick jokes for an hour, as per usual,” I said. “Let me know.”

Here’s the result. We talk wolves, climate change, remote viewing, walking statues and more. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it.

I would also like the record to show that I am the first woman to join the podcast team – and this is the 19th recording. Tsk tsk.

I thought he was funny and ballsy then, and I still think so. Our chat was deeply enjoyable. Choice cut: “The perfume industry is craven, mendacious and trivial. Companies operate by a different principle called money – and it’s not that interesting.”

On an editorial in the journal Nature, which describes his theory as having “almost no credence in scientific circles” and which has received an ”extraordinary—and inappropriate—degree of publicity  from uncritical journalists”, he simply comments: “An egregious piece of drivel.”

Long story short, this is what rival scientist Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University said in a BBC News piece about his work:

“I like to think of the vibration theory of olfaction and its proponents as unicorns. The rest of us studying olfaction are horses. The problem is that proving that a unicorn exists or does not exist is impossible. This debate on the vibration theory or the existence of unicorns will never end, but the very important underlying question of why things smell the way they do will continue to be answered by the horses among us.”

So he has this as his email signature.

Though I have kept my religious beliefs the same: “1. Animals are cool. 2. Turn up the bass.”

For posterity, here is an old essay I wrote about my lame self, penned in 2007, probably late at night with a bottle of wine and an inflated sense of self importance.

According to “The Birthday Book” I was born on “The Day of the Storyteller,” which is pretty accurate. I’m a freelance journalist and an incessant chatterbox.

http://www.zoecormier.com

Likes:

Photography

Worrying

Biology, nature, reality

Writing and rewriting

Correct spelling

Turns of phrase

My friends

Being organized

Bass

Passionate Geeks

Good food (esp proscuitto)

Working hard

Playing hard

Myself

Being alive

Dislikes:

Illness

Boredom

Broken cameras

Losing stuff

Forgetting things

Worrying

Pollution

Excessive use of synthetic chemicals

Bad food

Quiet and meek girls

Cold weather (except for skiing)

Fascist hippies

Bullshit

Cynicism

Apathy

Anger

Elitism

My ambition in life is to become a walking thesaurus.

I admit it: I’m a bit of a hippy, and a hopeless romantic. My feelings about plants and animals are borderline religious. I find the intricate structure of life inspiring beyond words. The fact that we are alive at all is astoundingly cool. I try to find reason every single day to be grateful.

But I’m also a journalist and a scientist – hence skeptical and sarcastic. I detest bad writing (of which there is a lot) and willfully ignorant people (of which there are a lot).

I don’t get to sleep easily and I don’t wake easily. I am a hardcore caffeine addict.

There’s nothing I hate more than being bored – so I never am.

I love to catalogue and archive information. My flickr site contains almost 10,000 photos, and my professional site holds all my published work. You should see my storage locker back in Toronto.

I’m loud, but I’m not an angry person. I hate rage. It takes a *lot* to make me lose my temper – but if I do it’s pretty explosive.

I’m pretty vain – but I’m not self-absorbed. I’m interested in just about everything anyone has to say to me, even stupid people (they provide fodder for comedy).

I make no apologies for my vanity: there’s no point in trying to be the person you want to be unless you’re proud of it. Self deprecation is for cowards. If you don’t like something about yourself, just fucking change it and stop whinging. It’s *not* that difficult.

Besides: my vanity extends around me. I think I have the most awesome group of friends in the world.

I have strong opinions on everything, but there’s just about only one thing in life of which I am positive: it’s too short.

On the queen’s jubilee weekend, I would have liked to have seen a bit more anti-monarchist dissent. This wasn’t quite the outburst of republican outrage that I was hoping for.

But I guess after several decades of seeing the punk protests come to little, and national opinion still overwhelmingly approve of funding inherited puppets, it’s fair that kids these days might just figure the best they can do is throw a big, filthy party and have their own kind of fun.

The lack of police was pretty miraculous – obviously they had bigger fish to fry elsewhere, national security and all that. Don’t expect I’ll see so many people hoofing balloons, smoking weed and snorting lines next to Broadway Market any time soon. Hats off.

Best part: The guy swimming through the lock, obvs.

My favourite boat: The one with the extra little yellow pool full of rubber duckies.

Smuggler's Notch, Vermont: March 19 2008

Enter: Climate change.

Aaaand, scene:

Smuggler's Notch, Vermont: March 22, 2012

Cloudless. Sunny. 24C.

Andy got a sunburn. I poured with sweat. And Slunt strode through the crisp spring streams barefoot, defiant and deliriously happy.

Normally you can walk over - not through - this river.

“For too long winter has destroyed our crops, blocked out the sun, and put an end to our summers!” he proclaimed. “No more, we say! At long last, mankind shall vanquish our primal foe. ‘Tis now that we see man’s penultimate triumph over nature.”

And so we did. With the aid of the world’s  Brobdingnagian fossil fuel infrastructure (which we used to fly to Vermont, hooray!), combined with the incessant, effortless consumption of three billion lazy people who buy too much shit.

End result: gorgeous summer walk in the woods in March.

I simultaneously love and loathe when environmental specialists (like myself) are proven correct in our assertion that climate change will progress more dramatically than anyone ever thought possible.

Back row, left to right: My brother Ben, mother Martha, grandmother Gloria, cousin Ella, aunt Mary. Front row, cousin Ruby, and me.

At her birthday dinner, my grandmother said as we paid the bill: “But this is all very strange – I’m NOT old, I’m young!”

One might easily dismiss such a statement as nothing more than a doddering denial of her mortality. Admittedly a bit adorable – but nonetheless a bit deluded.

In fact, she had simply repeated something that I have heard many elderly people say, and apparently her own parents said as well: the way they felt inside never really changed. They felt like the same singular person at the age of 15 and at 85. Our mental dexterity might decline, short term memory fade, but knowledge increase and wisdom thus accumulate (hopefully – only if we’ve been paying attention). But from what I’m told, there is an immutable, endearing sense of self that doesn’t really change.

There’s something rather comforting in that.

My side project Guerilla Science has a lovely new office in King’s Cross at the terribly wonderful Centre for Creative Collaboration, which we share with dozens of other young funky organisations, like MzTEK, Pavegen, and The Public Domain Review.

I left our business card tacked up on the wall, amid a collage of pictures from our most photogenic exploits. The next day the card was gone – I figured somebody had seen it and thought, “what cool cats, I’m gonna look them up.” Then I found this on the floor. Our card, poached for roach. Alas. That wasn’t quite what we meant by “Mixing Science With Art Music & Play”. Sigh. It seems you can take Guerilla Science out of the festival… but we’re always at a bloody festival.

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.