On July 6, 2003, a 230-foot dish in Yevpatoria, Crimea, aimed not to listen but to speak. The Yevpatoria Planetary Radar transmitted a digital message called Cosmic Call 2 toward five sun-like stars. The transmission lasted three hours. Its contents included a Rosetta Stone of basic concepts, digitized drawings, and musical compositions. The target stars—55 Cancri, 47 Ursae Majoris, and three others—range from 32 to 69 light-years away. The messages will arrive between 2036 and 2049. No reply can be expected for at least 64 years.
This event was a METI, or Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, act. It stands in contrast to the more common SETI, which only listens. The practice is controversial within the scientific community. Critics, including Stephen Hawking, warned that announcing humanity's presence could be dangerous. Proponents argue that any civilization advanced enough to detect and decode the faint signal is likely already aware of our planet through other means.
The transmission was not a government project. It was organized by a group called Team Encounter and composed by scientists and artists. The data was beamed using the same high-power radar once used to track Soviet space probes. The telescope fell into disuse after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Cosmic Call 2 was the second such broadcast from Yevpatoria; the first went out in 1999. These messages are now traveling through space at the speed of light. They are bottles thrown into a cosmic ocean of staggering scale. The act is less about a realistic hope for contact and more a symbolic gesture—a deliberate, long-term testament to a species that chose to say hello.