From Brisbane Times:

More than 25,000 messages have been transmitted into outer space in a bid to reach a distant planet that may hold life.

But don't hold your breath for an immediate response as it will take four decades for a reply to reach Earth and that's only if the messages are received by intelligent life that understand them.

The messages, transmitted at about midday AEST from the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communication Complex outside Canberra, have come from 195 countries including some from places such as the Vatican city, Antarctica and Kosovo.

Each message, a maximum of 160 characters long, was collated on a website called "Friends from Earth" and all 25,880 messages were beamed together in a giant twitter-like message that took two hours to send.

From Stanislaw Lem's Solaris:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos... We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past.