The 1986 Poetica Vaginal signal, briefly transmitted from the MIT Millstone Radar, was an techno-art project created by Joe Davis who was concerned about government censorship of messages such as the removal of genatilia on the voyager probe record. His response was to utilize a sensitive instrument to record the contractions of a woman's vaginal canal, convert it into analog signal and digitally map the input into a phoenetic audible representation (or voice).[2] The project was able to send out a few "test signals" consisting of this data to the intended targets; however, the US Air Force shutdown the project before it sent out the bulk of the message.[2]
"Across the Universe", "Hello From Earth" and "A Simple Response to an Elemental Message" are not always considered serious. The first two of them were sent to Polaris, which is 431 light years distant from us and whose planetary system, even if it exists, may not be suited for life, because it is a supergiant star, spectral type F7Ib which is only 70 million years old.[7] In addition, both transmission rates were very high, about 128 kbit/s, for such moderate transmitter power (about 18 kW). The main defect of the "Hello From Earth" is an insufficient scientific and technical justification, since no famous SETI scientist made statements with validation of HFE's design. As it follows from [1]: "After the final message was collected on Monday 24 August 2009, messages were exported as a text file and sent to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where they were encoded into binary, packaged and tested before transmission", but nobody explained why he hopes that such encoded and packaged text will be understood and conceived by possible extraterrestrials.
These seven messages have targeted stars between 20 and 69 light-years from the Earth. The exception is the Arecibo message, which targeted globular cluster M13, approximately 24,000 light-years away. The first message to reach its destination will be A Message From Earth, which should reach the Gliese 581 planetary system in Libra in 2029.