initialize camala: Communing with aliens at Secret Garden Party

Jessica Griggs, careers editor

(Image: Flavia Fraser-Cannon)

Dancing like an idiot, losing your wellies in the mud and not being able to find the way back to your tent in the wee hours of the morning are all de rigueur parts of the festival-going experience. However, unless you are aided by some particularly effective mind-bending hallucinogenics, talking to aliens is not usually on the line-up.

But this is exactly what festival revellers were able to do on Saturday afternoon if they stumbled across the Guerilla Science tent at Secret Garden Party in Cambridgeshire, UK.

Over the previous two days, people had been scrawling messages to send to extraterrestrials that ranged from the semi-profound - ?When did you realise you were not alone??, to the not so profound ?Does my bum look big in Uranus?? and ?Does Justin Bieber sound as bad up there as he does down here?? on a big black board.

Yet, our potted history of attempts at extra-terrestrial communication already includes a Doritos advert and the vaginal contractions of a ballet troupe sent by an artist concerned that no information on human reproduction had ever been broadcast, in the company of which the festival messages didn?t look quite so incongruous. Jeff Lashley, a technical support engineer from National Space Centre in Leicester encoded each letter of the messages into a string of 0 and 1s and released them into the cosmos via a radio transmitter. A stream of hilarious video recording was also sent - mostly consisting of people welcoming ET with open arms: ?Come and see us, I?ll introduce you to my family?. I couldn?t help but think this would make a great beginning to the next alien invasion sci-fi flick - oh, those na?ve humans.

Continuing with the theme of alien life, Louise Preston, a geologist turned astrobiologist from the Open University, gave a captivating talk about her work simulating fake missions to the Moon, Venus and Mars at Earthly analogues such as the acidic Rio Tinto basin in Spain, places in Antarctica and in Canadian impact craters. The packed audience hung on her every word as she described how her group drops all their equipment from the air, including a fake rover known as the Bieber (who else?), before communicating with ?astronauts? from a control room as they take photos and samples of the site.

At the end of her talk, there was a stampede to the front of the tent to hold the meteorites she had brought along with her, the only collection in the country that is allowed to be taken outside the lab. It was pretty humbling to hold a piece of Mars rock that would have been thrown off the surface of the red planet during an impact, only to find its way into Earth?s orbit and eventually crash land.

(Image: Jessica Griggs)

Arrivals from outer space weren?t the only subjects contemplated at the festival?s science hub however. After dragging my legs through the extremely sticky mud (a result of days of rain and people followed by bright sunshine) to sample some yummy festival food, I returned to the tent later in the day to find festival goers dressed as up as vaccines, complete with ?antigen? balls dangling from their hats. Their task was to make it through a manufacturing obstacle course in the quickest time without losing their immunity-giving antigens. Cue comical scenes of people dancing in a paddling pool of corn starch (to mimic the goo found in the bioreactor), then squeezing themselves through holes in pink tarpaulins during the filtration process before wriggling beneath a net supposedly representing the chromatography stage before being literally vacuum packed into a plastic bag. Hilarious stuff, but I?m not sure quite how many people left with a good idea of exactly how vaccines are made. Still, when you?re having this much fun, the ins and outs of chromatography are almost beside the point.

(Image: Jessica Griggs)

Those who didn?t fancy putting their face so close to the mud had the opportunity to enjoy a Flavour Feast hosted by food scientist and Heston Blumenthal prot?g? Rachel Edwards Stuart. Through simple experiments, Edwards Stuart demonstrated just how multi-sensory an experience eating is. Stale crisps? Make them fresh again by listening to a crunch sound on your iPod just as you take a bite. Think you can tell the difference between the citrus Skittles and the berry flavoured ones? Not if you hold your nose.

Of course, not all subtleties in flavour are evident to everyone, as I learned. When I was able to pick out gooseberry notes typically found in white wine in a wine dyed to look red and could identify the taste of celery in a spoonful of murky gloop, Edwards Stuart let me know that, like a quarter of the population, I am a supertaster. Finally, a reason for hating rocket lettuce (arugula) that doesn?t make me sound like an epicurean philistine - the bitter taste apparently overwhelms my supertasting taste buds.

In addition to learning about the ins and outs of taste, on the last day of the festival, founding member of Guerilla Science Zoe Cormier gave us more reason to appreciate the sounds of music. She explained that the crazy burning feeling, goosebumps and shivers that headliners Orbital induced in the heaving crowd the night before are all down the rush of adrenaline and endorphins flooding through our brain when we listen to music. Rather than merely being ?auditory cheesecake? as Steven Pinker once suggested, Cormier explained how research has shown that listening to music uses more parts of the brain than any other activity and causes our neurons to pulse in synchrony with each other ?like nothing else does?. It cast the festival experience in a new light. I went home feeling that between the time spent at the Guerilla Science tent and all those hours listening and dancing to music, I must have given my brain a really good work out.

But what about the aliens? reply? Even though it would normally take years for a message to reach even our closest neighbouring star, the Guerilla Scientists must have ET on speed-dial as a message came back almost instantaneously: Peace. Bieber is our god. Please send.

Looks like Earth is not the only celestial body on which the floppy-haired one has managed to achieve world dominance.