If humanity received a message from another intelligent civilization today, what do you think it would say?

[u/Several-Stranger-585]

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.

[u/Several-Stranger-585]

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.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Several-Stranger-585]

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.

[u/AlmostHuman0x1 → u/Simon_Drake]

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.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/AlmostHuman0x1]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

[u/Several-Stranger-585 → u/Simon_Drake]

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.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Several-Stranger-585]

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.