Hi, aliens? I've got a few-hic-things to say to you!

Thanks to Blog in Space's access to a ''powerful deep space transmission dish, it is now entirely possible that an alien civilization's first inkling of earth's existence will come in the form of a suburban mother's 6,000-word rhapsody about the texture of her baby's poop.

 For almost a half-century now, humanity has been on a noble quest to probe the deepest reaches of space, make contact with alien life forms and apparently annoy and confuse the hell out of them.

The heyday of earth's efforts to bafflingly announce its presence was the 1970s. Early that decade, the spacecrafts Pioneer 10 and 11 were fitted with gold plaques that featured anatomically accurate renderings of a male and female human. The man, smiling and pantless, was waving in a friendly manner. I raise this only to support my prediction that when the case of Abducted Hillbilly v. UFO is finally heard by the Intergalactic Supreme Court, the ruling will be that we pretty much asked for all that anal probing.

Eavesdropping on Aliens: Could changing channels tune into alien civilizations?

A vast antenna farm in the Australian Outback may pick up the equivalent of talk radio and TV from other solar systems.

Astrophysicists are waiting for a message from space. The Harvard University physicists have decided to join the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The effort, still considered somewhat suspect by some scientists, started in 1960. But, so far, nobody has heard a peep from the aliens.

Scientist hope that will change with the completion of the Murchison Wide-Field Array (MWA), a radio telescope under construction in Australia. Astronomers and cosmologists eagerly await the MWA because it will offer a new glimpse of conditions in the early universe. They also want to sift through MWA's flood of data for the telltale signs of other galactic civilizations.