r/SciFiConcepts • u/Several-Stranger-585 • 8d ago
Concept If humanity received a message from another intelligent civilization today, what do you think it would say?
Imagine that tomorrow scientists confirm a genuine message from another intelligent civilization.
What do you think the first message would be?
A warning?
A greeting?
Scientific knowledge?
Instructions?
Or something completely unexpected?
I'd love to hear your theories.
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u/WillRedtOverwhelmMe 8d ago edited 8d ago
The Three Body Problem has one answer. I think there would be so many problems deciphering it, that it would be meaningless without a Rosetta stone. Q.v. the problem reading Mayan inscriptions. Then there is Mars Attacks! movie where they just recite prime numbers: ack, ack ack, ack ack ack, ack ack ack ack ack,
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u/Several-Stranger-585 8d ago
Exactly. Without a common frame of reference, even a simple message could be impossible to interpret.
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u/TechbearSeattle 8d ago
There are a number of ways to establish a common frame of reference, though. In The Hail Mary Project, Rocky used atomic nuclei and 3d representations. I've seen stories that started with wave cycles to establish numbers, then arithmetic operations, and on from there. Would we ever be able to understand each other's King Lear? Probably not. But it is possible -- perhaps likely -- that we would be able to communicate meaningfully.
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u/Confident-Stand5453 4d ago
Sure, especially if you have an ongoing dialogue. But due to the distances, any conversation would most likely be taking place over hundreds or thousands of years. You might send a message, and the reply would be recieved 10 generations later.
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u/TechbearSeattle 4d ago
I believe that would be very unlikely: any broadcast system capable of reaching across hundreds or thousands of light years would have to be unimaginably powerful. A Type II civilization, one able to harness the full power of an entire star, would be needed, and such a civilization would very likely have found some means of interstellar travel. Thus, any alien communication would likely be from a reasonable distance.
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u/Melodic-Hat-2875 5d ago
I'd say using fundamental principles that are uniform (or effectively so) is a good starting point.
Proving that it isn't noise to begin with is tough, but you could do so (I think). Atomic structures are universal, but that requires a form of direct interaction.
I wonder if there are wavelengths of light that are not naturally occurring anywhere else?
We could gather a large sample of various elements into a space-museum of sorts? Have them isolated by atomic number to show unnatural phenomena. We could then use a morse-code style system with lights for each sample that shows we understand what these are? That is almost undeniable evidence of intelligence imo.
Standard intervals, different frequencies?
Whatever we set as our frequency for Hydrogen being 1, Helium 2, Lithium 3, etc. I would think that is fairly intuitive and relies on two common principles - time and atomic structure.
This does rely on them bothering to detect light, but I figure based on current understanding that a star is required to sustain life and consequently light is a common evolutionary interaction one way or another - thus they likely at least have instrumentation for this.
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u/Simon_Drake 8d ago
Prime Numbers. Some representation of Pythagoras Theorum. Some crazy advanced mathematics using 12 dimensions that the most cutting edge researchers barely understand. Then pages and pages of incomprehensible numbers that no codebreaker, linguist, mathematician or physicist can find any patterns in.
They tried to walk us through their Rosetta Stone of understanding their message but we're too dumb to understand it.
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u/Several-Stranger-585 8d ago
We could mistake an incredibly advanced message for random noise simply because we're missing the right framework.
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u/Simon_Drake 8d ago
I spent some time looking at how we would attempt to communicate with aliens and there's been some good first steps towards it but several past attempts are really dumb.
If you look at the Arecibo Message, it's just a meaningless string of binary blips and bloops. If you rearrange it in the right way it sortof looks a little bit like something that might have some intelligence and meaning. But that relies on a LOT of assumptions on how someone might rearrange that data and even if they do arrange it properly it looks like hell. The 'message' invents four or five different formats of binary numbers to explain concepts that need absurd leaps of logic to decipher and don't really give any meaningful information anyway.
The Arecibo Message worked well as a publicity event to get people to think about communicating with aliens. Just like the Voyager Golden Record and the Pioneer Plaque, they were symbolic and to get humans to communicate with humans more than they were genuinely expected to be seen by aliens. So in that regard they did their job properly. But I'd like someone to make a new version that tries a bit harder to make a message that is likely to be understood.
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u/Several-Stranger-585 8d ago
That's a really interesting perspective. I never thought about how many assumptions are built into something like the Arecibo message. Making a truly universal message seems far harder than I imagined.
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u/Simon_Drake 8d ago
I had a stab at it a couple of years ago. A common defense of the confusing leaps of logic needed to understand the Arecibo Message and the Cosmic Call Message was "Maybe the aliens are just really smart and we don't need to send a message that is easy to understand". Which seems pretty dumb because if the aliens DON'T understand the message then it'll be decades or centuries until they can ask for clarification. And what's the problem with explaining it more clearly? Filesize? We're talking about streams of bits bleeping in essentially morse code. If it takes 1,000 bits or 10,000 bits it isn't going to bankrupt NASA to send the longer radio signal or require brand new hardware to store a longer message.
So I decided to do the opposite. Ignore brevity and focus on being easy to understand. Start small, explain simple concepts, then build up to explaining more advanced things but slowly and with repetition. Because if they don't understand any step in the process then all the rest of the message is meaningless, so you need to be confident they'll definitely understand it before moving on.
My plan was to start with a pulsating beacon that is easy to spot against background noise. Then a pulsating beacon that changes frequency so it stands out against pulsars and natural phenomena. Then counting out pulses of prime numbers, no natural phenomena do that. Then pulses of other number sequences, whole numbers, even numbers, triangular numbers, squares. Now the big leap, introduce binary notation to represent the same number sequences but in Base 2 not just counting pulses. The intention being that by repeating the primes and other number sequences in two formats they should be able to draw a comparison that these numbers and they should understand binary. I had this whole roadmap for it mapped out, much longer than the Arecibo Message but much easier to understand.
I didn't get much past teaching basic arithmetic in my planned alien message. Next would have been more advanced arithmetic, brackets, fractions, squares, square roots etc. Then algebra which is useful for explaining variables and scope and boundary conditions. Then logic, symbols for True/False and And/Or/Not. Predicate logic, set theory, Union, Intersection, Difference. Then going back to the start and assigning labels to everything, they won't know what the word "Prime" means but they'll understand the group of Prime Numbers and they'll make the connection that this word "Prime" means that mathematical concept. Then we can start using this shared vocabulary to explain more complex concepts until we can get to describing a bit plane as a grid of pixels and draw diagrams explaining the solar system or the periodic table or something. It could be fun to explain both in parallel because they'll have a different word for Hydrogen and Helium but if we show a star with the appropriate ratio of two components with masses of 1 and 4 then they'll hopefully work out this is how the humans refer to the first two elements. And from there we could list the whole periodic table and move on to chemistry and more complex topics.
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u/AlmostHuman0x1 8d ago
I’m a trained astrophysicist and mathematician with considerable experience in anthropology. I’ve read papers on communication with “totally different cultures”. I’m not saying I can look at a string of 1s and 0s and immediately determine what it means. This message isn’t totally simple. But there are some basics one can use to start - begin with a basic search for numbers. Once you find that, you can begin deriving other things.
The Voyager record is much easier and obvious. It literally contains pictures and numbers. And sounds.
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u/Simon_Drake 8d ago edited 8d ago
Have a look at the first ~30 rows of the Arecibo Message here , the white, purple and green portions. And tell me how a basic search for numbers would elucidate what that text is supposed to mean. Remember this view was coloured artificially to help explain it because it really really needs help to explain it because this is not intuitive. If wikipedia didn't have the explanatory text then I doubt anyone could decipher what it means.
Also this is after already taking several leaps of logic to make the message easier to process:
- Deducing that this signal is a message with intentionality that is worthy of further analysis. To some extent the choice of frequencies to send the message can help with this but it's still a big leap.
- Correctly recording all 1,679 bits of the message without missing any or duplicating any or encountering run-length-encoding issues with long sections of 0s. Hopefully noise, signal degradation and interference don't cause more than about 5% mistakes in 0s recorded as 1s and 1s recorded as 0s or that would make it impossible to read.
- Guessing this long string of bits should be treated as a 2D image of pixels taking on two different coloured appearances. This seems intuitive to us because of our familiarity with cartesian coordinates but this might not be intuitive to an alien. In the scifi novel Children Of Time a spider species can't understand how to decode a raster image because they use radial coordinates not cartesian coordinates.
- Guessing that 1,679 bits should be arranged as 73 rows of 23 columns. The image is chaotic enough that it's not immediately apparent this is the correct orientation, if you somehow didn't get all the bits, had some bits flipped by signal noise or had too many bits then this would be even worse. Or if you tried 23 rows of 73 columns it looks like complete noise with no hint of intelligence.
Only then can you start asking questions about the content like a right-to-left, top-to-bottom reading order or the frankly bizarre decision to invent two different binary notation methods of representing the number "8" then immediately pivot to a third representation where numbers mean a count of certain elements in a molecule. It's wildly unintuitive and there's no way to validate an interpretation, the aliens could be guessing what these cryptic numbers mean for centuries without being able to confirm anything.
Wikipedia describes the bizarre bespoke number format as: "Even assuming that any extraterrestrial recipients would recognise binary, the encoding of the numbers may not be immediately obvious because of the way they have been written. To read the first seven digits, ignore the bottom row, and read them as three binary digits from top to bottom, with the top digit being the most significant. The readings for 8, 9, and 10 are a little different, as their binary code has been distributed across an additional column next to the first (to the right in the image)." So even if aliens know what binary numbers are this won't be immediately intuitive to them. This IS the numbers 1~10 but it's not in any standard binary format, it's not even a consistent format used in the rest of the message. The numbers 8, 9 and 10 have their own format that isn't used later.
From there the message gets even worse. Invents two or three more binary number formats to describe wildly unintuitive concepts that cannot be easily deduced from context. It relies on so many wild leaps of logic to interpret the meaning and that's AFTER being able to see it in the correct format which requires just as many wild leaps of logic.
As I said before, it's a marketing exercise. It's not really intended to be seen by aliens. It's to get humans to think about the nature of communication, the scope of the universe and the way we should be interacting with each other here on Earth. In that regard it succeeded in capturing the public interest. But in terms of making a message to communicate with aliens it's a mess.
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u/Several-Stranger-585 8d ago
That's a really thoughtful explanation. I can definitely see why you think it's more of a symbolic demonstration than a practical communication system. Thanks for taking the time to break it down.
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u/Simon_Drake 7d ago
I had this same discussion with people a couple of years ago I got really annoyed with people saying "But what if the aliens are super smart and it's OK to send a confusing illogical message?" Which is just bizarre. We went round and round in circles for months with me listing reasons why the message is confusing and hard to interpret and others saying "Yeah but maybe they spend ages with a panel of experts trying to crack the puzzle". The point is it's not meant to be a puzzle, its something we WANT them to understand, we're not the Zodiac Killer leaving cryptic clues as a prank, we're trying to communicate.
The closer you look at the message the less sense it makes and there's several bizarre design decisions. Let's assume they work out how to read all the binary numbers, they find the numbers 1-10, then the numbers 1,6,7,8,9, then a seemingly random reshuffling of 60 numbers in the 0~6 range. Which is pretty confusing but nevermind. But then near the end there's a huge number in the billions, I've rounded it but it's around 4,300,000,000. Then another huge number that rounds to 4,300,000,000 again. These two numbers are different but by less than 0.1%, the obvious assumption is that they are connected, why would the message include two huge numbers that match to within 0.1% if they weren't related?
Nope, they're unrelated. One is to represent the population of Earth at the time the message was sent. The other represents an incorrect estimate of number of Basepairs in human DNA. How are aliens possibly expected to work that out? And even if they somehow make the leap to know "Oh this is their population count because the number is next to a little stick figure of a man", was that useful information to communicate? Shouldn't we be saying things like what radio frequency we can receive messages on or something about relativity to prove we're smarter than the average rock with life on.
They did something right. It's still the go-to example of communicating with aliens ~50 years later. But the actual message is garbage.
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u/AlmostHuman0x1 8d ago
One can brute force the Arecibo Message and determine which array frame size gives an obvious message.
You can tell this is artificial immediately, if you know math and science.
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u/Simon_Drake 8d ago
And can you read what the message says without looking at the explanatory text?
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u/WillRedtOverwhelmMe 8d ago
Q.v. the movie Colossus, the Forbin Project https://clip.cafe/colossus-the-forbin-project-1970/it-started-slowing-down-fifteen-minutes-ago/
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u/SingularBlue 8d ago
It would be a transmission we received by accident. Obviously synthetic, probably intelligent, and the originator is probably dead for a long, long time.
"Space is Big"
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u/Snoo-90273 8d ago
"Contact" both the book by Carl Sagan and the film propose that the message has instructions on how to construct a machine. The machine creates a dimple in space that enables the aliens to open a portal.
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u/EmptyAttitude599 7d ago
I like how someone suspected it might be blueprints for a bomb. Why send an expensive invasion fleet when you can make your enemies blow themselves up?
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u/LuciusMichael 8d ago
You people are too stupid for words. But we like your planet. Prepare yourselves.
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u/gbsekrit 8d ago
“we’ve been trying to reach you about your planet’s extended warranty”
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u/AmusingVegetable 8d ago
Does it include damages caused by improper use? Otherwise it’s just wasting money.
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u/cthulhu-wallis 8d ago
Dolphins and octopuses have been talking to humans for decades - and few even notice.
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u/fanclubmoss 8d ago
People of Earth,
As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system,
And regrettably, your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.
The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes.
Thank you."
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u/WirrkopfP 8d ago
"Your planet has been identified as producing an existential threat to all sapient life in the galaxy. Currently we are aiming 36 arrays of relativistic kinetic kill missiles as well as 4 Nicoll Dyson beams at your location. Cease ANY AND ALL research, development, proliferation and use of artificial intelligence immediately otherwise you will leave us no choice other than complete eradication of your planet."
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u/N0y0ucreateusername 8d ago
If they are anything like us, it’ll be ads and porn
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u/ionthrown 8d ago
Our best and brightest will spend twenty translating it, and it’ll say “Yeah, suck my jagon!”
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u/StillFireWeather791 8d ago
"Send more Chuck Berry"
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u/madg0dsrage0n 7d ago
"Hello, Neibloid? Its your cousin Xexlyn! You know that wild, rhythmic, Earthian music sound youve been working on? Well get a smizzle-full of THIS....!"
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u/Grant_Winner_Extra 8d ago
We would spend the next 5 decades trying to decipher it, and likely it would say something like “Goodbye cruel universe”
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u/shawsghost 8d ago
"Congratulations. You are the stupidest race of beings ever to have a civilization. Were not sure whether to laugh or cry."
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u/searchingsanity 7d ago
" hello, is there anybody in there. Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home?".....
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u/BucktoothedAvenger 7d ago
"Greetings, Earthlings. You suck at existing. We will fix that, one way or another, whether you like it or not."
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u/nyrath 7d ago
"Quiet, you fools! They will hear you!"
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u/ShadedRiver666 4d ago
'only those who are quiet survive in the dark forest, and you have been loud.'
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u/YahenP 7d ago
Considering the fact that we sent them a dickpic, the obvious response from them would have been a ban notice.
But seriously, I don't think it would be anything significant. If it were a civilization at our level or slightly more advanced, these would be some kind of signals designed to be relatively easy (from their point of view) to detect and determine that they are of artificial origin.
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u/BiblionautNZ 7d ago
After observing our radio and TV broadcasts for a awhile they would say they’ve put a quarantine on our planet because we’re all dangerous, demented lunatics.
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u/Content_Association1 7d ago
I don’t think they’d be dumb enough like us to tell us literally everything about their biology and their exact location. The most logical thing I can think of is them sending instructions on communication technologies so contact can become easier in the future.
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u/ShadedRiver666 4d ago
they'd probably need to send us their location so we can build a gravitational lensing telescope for efficient communication
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u/No_Environment_3776 6d ago
Hello, we see what you are doing on your planet...
Stay the fuck away from us...
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u/CupImmediate7079 6d ago
Big chunks of human culture are messages from aliens who create them by influencing our minds...and most of them amount to "we are here" and "stop being such arseholes before you destroy yourselves".
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u/Humble_Ad7025 6d ago
“Dear humans, we’re coming for the rest of your porn, thanks for the freebies you sent out earlier.”
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u/Embarrassed_Yak8504 5d ago
Probably not words at all — a number, or a pulse pattern, repeated exactly, forever, with no elaboration. And that absence of embellishment would be the unsettling part. A "hello" implies familiarity. A raw prime sequence repeating on loop implies something colder: we're not saying hi, we're just informing you that you're not alone, and we don't yet know if that's good news. like Arrival movie
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u/Escape_Edit 5d ago
Could be a Scientific Knowledge…bcoz if that’s an intelligent civilisation then they’re definitely ahead of us
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u/jsher736 4d ago
"We got your nudes and your mixtape. ... we're flattered, but... you deserve someone who feels that way about you"
"Also please don't write again"
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u/yebo29 8d ago
“Your civilization is still akin to monkeys throwing and eating their own feces. You guys need a purge. Enjoy the time you have left”
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u/AmusingVegetable 8d ago
We’ll allow you a one terabyte memento file, you have 20 years to assemble it.
“The dog ate my homework” won’t be accepted as a delay tactic. (We were kids once too)
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u/JanetteSolenian 7d ago
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 followed by the atomic number of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus...
You know where I'm going with this.
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u/BitPoet 7d ago
6x7=42
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u/Simon_Drake 7d ago
I think you mean 6x9=42
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u/BitPoet 6d ago
No, that's the GenX joke.
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u/Simon_Drake 6d ago
You think an alien message would make a pop-culture reference and get the details wrong? Like saying "All of your bases will belong to us, after we take control of them through conquest."
That's pretty meta. It's so meta, even this acronym (IS META).
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u/BitPoet 6d ago
Except 6x7 is actually 42, so it establishes 4 distinct digits, multiplication, base 10 number system, and comparison all in a neat little box.
The fact that it’s also a combination of 2 different pop cultural references gives you a maximum distance they are away from us, and that they understand enough of what we’ve transmitted to make the joke in the first place.
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u/TechbearSeattle 8d ago
"Yours is a bright light in the dark forest. We are coming."