The First Contact Project

The electromagnetic spectrum is mostly blocked by Earth's atmosphere. Gamma rays, X-rays, and ultraviolet light are absorbed in the upper atmosphere. Most of the infrared spectrum is absorbed by atmospheric gases. Long-wavelength radio waves (>10 m) are reflected off the ionosphere and cannot escape into deep space.

There is a narrow radio transparency window — approximately 1 cm to 10 m wavelength (roughly 30 MHz to 30 GHz) — where the atmosphere is nearly opaque to external radiation but allows outbound transmissions to pass through. This is the window that SpaceSpeak exploits.

First Contact operates in the 2.4–5 GHz band. This is the same frequency range used by NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 probes, currently the farthest human-made objects from Earth. At these frequencies, the atmosphere is nearly transparent, beam divergence is manageable over interstellar distances, and parabolic dishes can tightly focus the signal.

SpaceSpeak was founded by Dr. Peter Beery and operates a Phase I transmitter network in Tampa (FL) and Austin (TX), USA, and Brazil. Each site runs low-wattage transmitters coupled to parabolic dish antennas. The parabolic geometry focuses the broadcast into a tight beam, increasing effective radiated power by up to 300× compared to an isotropic antenna.

Phase II is an open, distributed STEM network of micro-transmitters. Each node uses Yagi directional antennas focused in a 20° cone — keeping the signal coherent across interplanetary distances. Combined, the nodes create a mesh that can target different regions of sky, giving messages wider angular coverage in deep space.

SpaceSpeak has set a Guinness World Recordwith Fun Kids UK for the first radio programme transmitted to deep space. It has been featured on History Channel's Project Blue Book and YouTube Premium's Mind Field.

Every transmission is registered on-chain before the radio signal is queued. The FirstContactRegistry contract accepts payments in K9 (Ethereum), native APE (ApeChain), or USDC (Arbitrum/Base), verifies the payment amount, and emits a TransmissionSent event containing:

• transmissionId — unique sequential ID on that chain
• contentHash — keccak256 of the message content, immutably linking on-chain record to the transmitted payload
• payloadType — TEXT (0), IMAGE (1), or NFT (2)
• nftContract + tokenId — for NFT payloads, the originating contract address and token ID are stored on-chain

For NFT payloads, the contract calls ownerOf() (ERC-721) or balanceOf() (ERC-1155) to confirm ownership at transmission time — without taking custody of the NFT.

First Contact supports four EVM chains, each with its own designated payment token. Token prices are dynamically quoted at current USD rates before submission.

APE payments on ApeChain feed the K9 buyback mechanism — aligning economic incentives with the token ecosystem. All price quotes are denominated in USD and converted at market rate at transaction time.

Once the on-chain transaction is confirmed and SpaceSpeak queues the payload, the platform begins tracking signal distance using the formula:

This is compared against 30 pre-defined celestial milestones ordered by distance from Earth, from the ISS at 408 km to Tau Ceti at 11.9 light-years. Each time a signal passes a milestone, the user can share the achievement on X.

The 30 milestones span seven orders of magnitude — requiring a logarithmic scale to visualize meaningfully. Early milestones (Moon, GPS belt, L2) are passed within seconds to minutes of launch. The outermost milestones (Proxima Centauri, Tau Ceti) will not be reached for thousands of years — but the signal will still be traveling when it arrives.

First Contact does not claim confirmed extraterrestrial contact today. What it does assume is statistical scale: our galaxy alone contains roughly 100–400 billion stars, with planetary systems appearing to be common rather than rare.

Current exoplanet data suggests that a meaningful fraction of stars host rocky worlds, and a subset of those can exist in temperate zones where liquid water is possible. Even with conservative assumptions, this implies millions to billions of potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way alone.

Zooming out, the observable universe contains on the order of trillions of galaxies. The project premise is simple: if star systems are this numerous, transmitting durable signals into space is a rational long-horizon bet on future discoverability — by humans, post-humans, or non-human intelligences.

Digital assets — including NFTs — depend on the continued operation of servers, blockchains, and human infrastructure. If civilization were disrupted, every IPFS node, every Ethereum validator, and every metadata server could go dark. The NFT would cease to exist in any recoverable form.

A radio-transmitted NFT is different. The photons carrying the payload leave Earth at the speed of light and cannot be recalled, censored, or deleted. They require no servers, no validators, no energy input. They carry the content hash, contract address, token ID, and image data encoded into the radio waveform — traveling perpetually through space.

Any sufficiently advanced receiver encountering the signal — human or otherwise — could reconstruct the original artifact. This is the premise of deep-time cultural preservation: the cosmos as the most durable storage medium in existence.