What Do You Say to An Extraterrestrial?
Dec 2nd, 2004 by Moonage
Seth Shostak asks that question on space.com. He eventually comes to this conclusion:
So here’s my take on message construction: Forget about sending mathematical relationships, the value of pi, or the Fibonacci series. Rid your brain of the thought (no doubt borrowed from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) that aliens are best addressed with musical arpeggios. No, if we want to broadcast a message from Earth, I propose that we just feed the Google servers into the transmitter. Send the aliens the World Wide Web. It would take half a year or less to transmit this in the microwave; using infrared lasers shortens the broadcast time to no more than two days.
That’s thinking kinda large. Plus, I think it’s kinda dangerous. I mean, what if the first thing the aliens hit was a page like this? Bad idea Seth, very bad. Klaatu answered this question a long time ago with a good plan. I think we should just stick with their plan and not risk scaring any super-advanced race into thinking that extinction would be the best thing they could do for mankind.
Here’s my version of what we need to do.
Just fire it up and play it over and over. You won’t get an answer any time soon, just know it’s working.
If you don’t like my version, here’s the original:
