‘World's First Interstellar Tourism Campaign’
Going by just that description, I thought that this campaign was aiming to be intentionally humorous. Then I saw who the campaign was for, and I had my doubts. It’s for the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau (VisitLEX) which has a history of head-scratching campaigns (see this, for example). In the present instance, going by the specifics of the campaign, and that it finds a mention on science and technology websites, they appear to take the idea of an interstellar promotion pretty seriously. In fact, it would be best if I let the Gizmodo report explain the campaign:
It’s a tourism stunt, but the message is very real. The invitation, beamed out last fall via infrared laser toward the TRAPPIST-1 star system, is a project by the Lexington tourism bureau (yeah, we’re sending ads to aliens now). According to VisitLEX, they worked with engineers, linguists, and the FAA to make it happen. The target star is 40 light-years from Earth, which means any extraterrestrials that are eager to visit the self-proclaimed Horse Capital of the World will know they are invited in 2063.
The communication includes a bitmap of prime numbers, elements associated with life, depictions of water, ethanol, and dopamine, horse and human forms, and a landscape. It also includes several images of Lexington and an audio recording by Tee Dee Young, a blues musician from Lexington.
We don’t know that any life, much less intelligent life, actually exists in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Last year, data from the Webb Space Telescope revealed that TRAPPIST-1b, one of the exoplanets orbiting TRAPPIST 1, has no atmosphere. Because life as we know it needs an atmosphere to survive, that all but confirmed there is no potential for life on TRAPPIST-1b. Webb followed up that discovery with the finding that there is also no atmosphere—or at most, a thin one—on planet TRAPPIST-1c. Luckily for the VisitLEX team, the TRAPPIST system has five other exoplanets that could theoretically host civilizations capable of interpreting their invitation.