How to Write Messages to Extraterrestrials

Before trying to contact aliens, maybe we should test our messages on ourselves.

In a new paper in the journal Space Policy, three alien-hunters suggest designing a standard protocol for writing intelligible letters to extraterrestrials, and building a website where teams can decode candidate messages to ensure they make sense.

"The basic idea is, if you're going to talk to aliens, you'd better have something that's understandable to humans," said UCLA planetary scientist Michael Busch, who has previously tried to design an ideal alien postcard but was not involved in the new work.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, colloquially known as SETI, has been attempting to eavesdrop on intelligent civilizations for the last 50 years, mostly by piggybacking on existing astronomical sky surveys. But as a species, humanity has tried to call ET only a handful of times.

These earlier messages were too complicated and human-centric to make sense to even a technologically advanced alien civilization, the researchers argue.…

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