When Your Target Audience Won’t Exist For 25,000 Years
The Multiverse Employee Handbook defines “Interstellar Marketing” as “the art of crafting a message so universal that even species without eyes, ears, or marketing departments might find it compelling.”
Which is to say: it’s harder than explaining cloud solutions to a board that still prints emails.
In 1974, humanity attempted its first major brand launch beyond Earth. We pointed the Arecibo telescope at a star cluster 25,000 light-years away and transmitted 1,679 bits of carefully arranged information—part résumé, part instruction manual, part nervous confession that we exist and would very much like acknowledgment of this fact.
The message was elegant. Binary. Mathematical. A perfect grid of ones and zeros that, when arranged correctly, revealed our cosmic business card: here’s how we count, here’s what we’re made of, here’s what we look like, and—critically—here’s the antenna we used to bother you with all this.
From a public relations standpoint, it was either brilliant or catastrophically premature. We’re still waiting to find out which.
Why Prime Numbers Make Better Introductions Than Jingles
The genius of the Arecibo Message wasn’t what it said—it was how it demanded to be read.
1,679 isn’t just a random number. It’s the product of two primes: 23 and 73. There’s only one sensible way to arrange those bits into a rectangular grid, and once you do, the pattern emerges. It’s a mathematical handshake that says, “We think in structure. We recognize patterns. We assume you do too.”
This is the interstellar equivalent of leading with your strongest value proposition. Not features. Not benefits. Just proof that you understand the fundamental architecture of communication itself.
Compare this to our usual approach on Earth, where we open with mission statements so vague they could describe either a tech startup or a bakery. “We leverage synergistic paradigms to ideate transformative experiences across multiple touchpoints.”
The cosmos doesn’t have time for that. The cosmos wants prime numbers and atomic weights, delivered in three minutes flat.
The Long Game of Cosmic Outreach
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about marketing to the universe: your audience might not receive your pitch until long after your entire civilization has evolved into something unrecognizable.
M13—the star cluster we aimed at—will have drifted by the time our message arrives. Even if someone’s home, they’ll get our transmission the way you get promotional mail for the previous tenant: technically accurate address, completely irrelevant recipient.
And yet we sent it anyway. Because the message wasn’t really about reaching M13. It was about proving to ourselves that we could reach out. That we’d advanced enough as a species to formulate a coherent thought and broadcast it at twenty trillion watts.
In corporate terms, it was a proof of concept. A demonstration that we’d moved beyond the pilot phase of planetary existence and were ready for broader market expansion—assuming the broader market was listening, interested, and not already subscribed to better content.
What We’ve Learned Since We Stopped Shouting
After Arecibo, we got quieter. Not from fear, necessarily, but from reflection.
The 1970s were a time of cosmic optimism. We’d walked on the Moon. We’d sent golden records on Voyager, complete with greetings in 55 languages and a photo of nude humans that, in retrospect, may have overshared. We assumed the universe was waiting for us to introduce ourselves, and we did so with the confidence of a startup presenting to investors who hadn’t read the deck yet.
But then we started asking harder questions. What if someone replies? What if they don’t? What if broadcasting our existence is less “bold marketing move” and more “emailing our coordinates to an unverified mailing list”?
Today, we build instruments that listen more than they speak. FAST in China, MeerKAT in South Africa, the Allen Array in California—vast dishes designed to eavesdrop on the universe rather than interrupt it. We’ve traded the confident pitch of 1974 for something closer to market research: quietly gathering data, analyzing signals, trying to understand what’s out there before we compose our next message.
The new field—METI, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence—debates whether we should keep sending at all. Some argue that silence is safer. Others insist that communication is part of discovery, and that any civilization advanced enough to hear us would view us with curiosity rather than conquest.
Both camps agree on one thing: if we’re going to send another message, we should probably workshop it first.
The Accidental Honesty of Entropy
The Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020. Its massive dish, the one that shouted our first hello into the void, tore apart and crumbled into the jungle below.
There’s a metaphor in that somewhere—something about the impermanence of even our boldest gestures, the way the universe doesn’t need to respond because time will eventually answer on its behalf.
But the message is still traveling. That three-minute transmission, launched nearly fifty years ago, continues moving through space at 300,000 kilometers per second. It’s part of the cosmic background noise now, a faint echo of the moment we decided to introduce ourselves.
And maybe that’s the most honest marketing we’ve ever done: not a polished campaign with follow-up metrics and conversion tracking, but a single, unrepeatable broadcast that said, “We’re here. We tried. We’re still figuring this out.”
No calls to action. No retargeting pixels. Just a message, drifting outward, carrying the faint hope that someone might hear it and think, “That’s interesting. I wonder what they’re like.”
Guidelines For Your Next Interstellar Pitch
If you’re planning to market your species to the cosmos, here are a few lessons from our first attempt:
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Lead with math, not adjectives. Prime numbers are universal. “Innovative solutions” are not.
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Keep it brief. Three minutes is enough to say who you are. Anything longer risks sounding like a webinar.
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Assume your audience is smarter than you. They probably are. And if they’re not, they won’t understand you anyway.
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Accept that you’ll never know if it worked. Cosmic marketing has a 25,000-year response time. Adjust expectations accordingly.
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Don’t overthink the reply. If someone answers, you’ll have bigger concerns than whether your branding was on point.
And most importantly: remember that the message is as much for you as for them. The act of composing it—of deciding what matters, what’s universal, what’s worth sending—is the real work. Everything after that is just signal propagation.
Conclusion: We’re Still Checking Our Inbox
So no, we haven’t heard back from M13. Or anyone else. The universe remains conspicuously silent, which could mean we’re alone, or it could mean everyone else learned long ago that Reply All is a bad idea.
But that first transmission—the Arecibo Message, humanity’s opening pitch—remains one of the most extraordinary things we’ve ever done. Not because it will reach anyone, but because it proved we were capable of trying.
And somewhere, light-years from here, that little grid of binary data continues its journey—a postcard from a small, noisy planet that figured out how to say hello and decided the cosmos was worth interrupting.
Even if no one ever reads it, the act of sending it mattered. Because marketing, at its best, isn’t about conversion rates or engagement metrics.
It’s about the moment you decide you have something worth saying.
Want to hear more? 🎧 Listen to the full episode — A Brief History of Humans Yelling Into Space: The Arecibo Message