You write it
Up to 280 characters. A note to your future self, your name, a joke, a goodbye. Whatever you want floating out there.
A capstone project about light and radio waves
Your words, moving at the speed of light.
Write a short message. I turn it into binary and send it out into space with my radio transmitter. Then you can watch where it is, live, as it heads out of the solar system.
Since you opened this page, light has traveled
0 km
How it works
Three steps, then it's out there forever.
It becomes binary
Every letter turns into 8 ones and zeros. That's the exact pattern the radio sends out, one bit at a time.
It leaves at light speed
Radio waves are light too, just a kind your eyes can't see. Your message passes the Moon in about 1.3 seconds and just keeps going.
Live map
Where is it right now?
The planets are where they actually are today, and every message moves at exactly the speed of light. Distances are squished on a log scale, otherwise everything past Mars would be way off your screen.
Sample
In deep space
0 km from Earth
0 dB path loss
Flying
- WASD or arrows to move
- QE down / up
- Shift go faster
- Drag look around
Scroll on the map to change it too
Loading the solar system
Drag to rotate · scroll or pinch to zoom · planet positions are calculated from NASA JPL orbital elements
Sample
"Hello from a small blue dot."
- Status
- In deep space
- Distance from Earth
- 0 km
- In AU
- 0
- Light travel time
- 0s
- Speed
- 299,792 km/s
- Bits sent
- 0
- Sent on
- 868.1 MHz
- Path loss
- 0 dB
- Signal left out there
- 0 dBm
Path loss is the free-space path loss formula, FSPL = 20 log(d) + 20 log(f) + 32.44. Every time the distance doubles, the signal gets 6 dB weaker.
This is a sample message so you can see how it works. Yours shows up here after you send it.
Back to the mapMilestones
Where it's been and what's nextSend yours
Write your message.
Keep it short and sweet. Once it's sent there's no taking it back, which is kind of the point.
Live preview
Your message shows up here
What the radio sends
0 bits
01010100 01111001 01110000 01100101 ...
0.0sof airtime
1.3sto pass the Moon
4.2 yrsto reach Proxima's distance
The honest part
Will aliens read it? Probably not.
Let's be real here. It's very unlikely anyone out there will ever decode your message, even if life exists somewhere else. Radio waves spread out as they travel, so the signal gets weaker and weaker the further it goes. Double the distance and it's four times fainter. After a while it sinks below the background noise of space and becomes basically impossible to pick out, even for someone who's listening.
But the wave itself never stops. It keeps moving outward at almost 300,000 km every second, for millions of years, way after all of us are gone. Space is so empty that the chance of it actually hitting something is incredibly small.
So it's less of a phone call to aliens, and more a way to be remembered. A tiny piece of you that's always out there, still traveling.
Who's behind this
Hi, I'm David.
I'm a high school student, and this is my capstone project. I've been studying electromagnetic radiation and waves, and at some point I figured I could actually use it instead of just reading about it. So I set up a radio transmitter and built this site, so other people can send something out too.
Got questions, ideas, or just want to say hi? Email me at hello@sayitto.space.
Questions
Stuff people ask me.
Does my message actually get sent?
Yes, that's the whole idea. Once I approve it, it goes into a queue, and a small LoRa radio here in Hungary sends it out on 868 MHz with the antenna pointed up at the sky. It's low power, about 25 mW, roughly what a car key fob uses. The map only starts counting once the radio has actually sent it. Right now payments aren't switched on yet, so sending is free while I finish setting things up.
Which direction does it go?
Straight out, away from Earth, wherever the antenna is pointing at the time. Radio doesn't curve, so on the map it's just a line leaving Earth. The faint line in front of it shows where it's headed next.
Why is the map not to scale?
Because space is ridiculously big. If Earth was 1 cm from the Sun, the nearest star would be about 2.7 km away. The map uses a log scale so you can see the planets and the far stuff at the same time. The numbers in the panel are the real ones though.
Is there anything I can't send?
Nothing hateful, nothing that's someone else's private info. I read through every message before it goes out, and if it breaks those rules it won't be sent.
Why does it cost money?
It covers the website hosting, the servers and message queue, the 3D map, and keeping the radio hardware running. You're not buying radio spectrum or satellite time, just the whole experience of sending something out and following it. It's still way cheaper than a postcard to the Moon.