We Have to Build a Cosmic Warning Network

Imagine you are a future interstellar traveler.

Your species has already spread to other planets in your own solar system, and now you are making the slow trek to other stars and other systems. What will you encounter there? Is there life, even intelligent life? And what might they be like?

You’ve got your monitoring instruments running at high fidelity to capture any and all radio signals and other technological fingerprints of a civilization that you might encounter. Then you hear it: a clear pattern in the noise. A planet in a system you are approaching is teeming with activity. You approach, carefully.

Now imagine that planet is Earth.

What would a visitor want to know?

What would you, as an outsider, a visitor — an alien — want to know about the planet? The biological and physical makeup is relatively easy to register from afar, but what about who lives there, and how do they live?

As an alien considering approaching or visiting Earth, you’d want to know ahead of time that you are looking at a planet of terror. And we, intelligent Earthlings, have the cosmic moral duty to warn anyone within earshot that this planet is hostile, violent, and ethically underdeveloped.

This is our message.

On Earth, there is a single species that subjugates, kills, and exploits almost all of its fellow Earthlings. Despite hundreds of millions of years of shared evolution, the species “human” has almost no regard for what other species might experience, want, or feel.

As an alien, you’d want to know this: humans are keeping and killing over 80 billion of their fellow terrestrial species every year in confinement in order to kill them for their flesh, or to take their young or their milk for their own consumption. They do this not out of necessity, but out of unthinking habit. The human species has built massive facilities and institutions for the exploitation of their fellow beings, and they operate this apparatus on an industrial scale unmatched by any other species on Earth. And while the human is a terrestrial animal, the species has also turned the waters of the planet into pools of horror, killing other animals in the trillions every year.

The human species is violent towards its own kind, too, but for each human killed by other humans, humanity kills over 100,000 times more of its other fellow Earthlings.

80+ billion

Terrestrial Earthlings kept in confinement and killed every year

Trillions

Earthlings killed in the planet’s waters every year

Earth is a planet of terror where a single species is committing murder and enslavement of its fellow species on a planetary scale. Any traveler drawn in by its signals deserves to be warned before they arrive or contact Earth, and the Cosmic Warning Network will warn them.

A network of transmitters around the world.

The Cosmic Warning Network (CWN) will be a network of radio transmitters beaming a message across the Solar System. Because we’re not aiming for interstellar communications, the stations will be relatively small and inexpensive to build and to maintain. Half a dozen CWN stations is enough for this purpose, and more can easily be brought online if any should fail or need replacement.

CWN’s message will be constructed following the best practices of METI and the Arecibo signal. The clear patterns will include visual metaphors of animals and humans, numbers illustrating the scale of the terrors humans inflict on other species, and geographic coordinates for some of the worst atrocity sites, such as large pig farms, broiler farms, and dairy farms. While semantic communication may be difficult or even impossible, mathematics such as coordinates, volumes, and vectors will provide the necessary context for the recipient.

On the air until it ends.

It is our responsibility to warn any potential visitors that the Earth is a planet of terror. Cosmic Warning Network will do that.

We will build and launch the first CWN stations in 2027, and we will keep operating them and sending our message into space until factory farming of animals on Earth is ended.