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The Message: What to Send?

Added: February 15, 2007

What to Send?

This is a big question.

On one level, the actual content of the message is secondary to sending it at all. (Just think if one of our SETI dishes picked up a signal that was certified sentient in origin, people would completely freak out regardless of whether it was an alien grocery list or plans for a time machine). For this reason, we will make sure to bookend our messages with single, unmodulated blasts of raw signal that will be about 10 times more powerful than the modulated (modulated = information carrying) portions of the transmission. This is the galactic equivalent of a loud "HOOOOONNNNNK!" on the car horn and will give us the best chance of getting noticed by Kang and Kodos.

On the other hand, sending an actual message is much more fun than just honking the horn, so we are going to try that also.

Arecibo

The only historical precedent for this kind of thing was in 1974, when the massive Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico was used to blast a 20 trillion watt message to the globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away. The message was a binary encoded pictograph consisting of 1679 bits, arranged into 73 lines of 23 characters per line. It contained a variety of images, including a picture of a DNA strand, various chemical formulas and a stick figure of a human. The total broadcast took about three minutes to complete and it is the only radio message in history sent from Earth into deep space with an alien audience in mind. Read more about it here. Some serious folks were behind the creation of the Arecibo message (Carl Sagan, Frank Drake etc.) and so we are borrowing some key ideas from it in formulating our own message.

The best part of the Arecibo message was the fact that it was a pictograph. This brilliant step gets around all the non-viability issues related to any type of terrestrial language and gets us into a realm in which universality is at least possible. For more on what we borrowed from Arecibo, read the theory section on the transmission frequency we will be using and why.

Other elements of Arecibo seem a bit odd, however, because they relate to things unique to Earth. How could the aliens possibly decode the binary representation of the chemical composition of our nucleotides? How would they know that weird squiggle thing was the DNA molecule? Why bury the stick figure of the human in among all the other images where it won't be recognized? In some portions of the message it seemed like our scientists were trying to come up with something extra tricky to prove how smart they were to the alien scientists puzzling over what the hell we were trying to say.

I, however, do not want to prove anything to the aliens. Nothing at all. I just like the idea of our little message being intercepted someday by something that might understand it. So, after borrowing the pictograph idea and the transmission frequency, we respectfully leave Arecibo behind and set off on our own in search of something more comprehensible, and (hopefully) more fun.

Beyond Arecibo

We now enter the mind-pulverizingly tricky issue of finding shared context between ourselves and sentient beings of completely unknown origin. When it comes to this, there is no option. We just have to guess.

First off, the range of possibilities is extremely broad. If they are gaseous conciousnesses 150,000 light years across, that drift in and out of the very fabric of space/time and live for trillions of years, then creating a common context with them is basically impossible. They may pick up the message in their vast interstellar neural network, and they may intuitively understand what we are trying to say regardless of how we say it, but most likely it will pass unnoticed on their galaxy sized frontal lobe as nothing more than a vague tingle.

The far end of the "possible types of life" spectrum is basically hopeless, but if we allow ourselves a few assumptions we can bring the problem of context into the realm of remotely solvable. Here's what we had to do to get it in the ballpark:

1. They are planet based.
If they have never seen a planet before, well, we are not going to communicate with them - plain and simple. As per the gas cloud example in the paragraph above, without a planetary frame of mind they aren't going to understand anything we say regardless of how we say it.

2. They have some type of technology based on electromagnetism, and are making some attempt to "listen".
If they don't know what electrons are and aren't listening for an electromagnetic transmission, well...I mean...jeez...just forget it. Without this in place, they aren't going to get any message from Earthlings, even if we get a nuclear reactor online and blast it out with a hundred trillion watts over a 50 mile wide dish made out of pure plutonium. No way, no how. The only hope we have on this one is that electromagnetism is everywhere, and is a likely basis for building a technology.

3. They understand "on" and "off".
Without the concept of basic binary coding this project is going nowhere, fast. If they can't figure out the difference between a "bleep" and a "blap", and then treat them as different things they aren't going to get anything we try to say.

That's it, three assumptions. Simple right?

Wrong. We could debate until doomsday about the probability of these three things being in place for a any given group of sentient beings. Just take a quick look at the Drake Equation for a quick primer on how quickly probabilities rocket out of control when you start factoring in the vast timeframes and innummeral variables involved in the evolution of life. Drake's analysis concluded that the number of inhabited worlds in our galaxy could range from only one (ours) to hundreds of thousands and that the question of life in the universe is unanswerable since we have no real data to formulate with (zero galaxies surveyed and one planet found is not a dataset).

Our goal was not to add or subtract anything from the debate about life in the universe. Our goal was to formulate a message that would improve the odds of being comprehended as much as possible. As far as the actual non-relative odds, well, do they really matter? They could be small, or they could be really really small, or they could be completely microscopicly virtually immeasurably sub-atomically small. Who knows?

Suffice to say that we aknowledge success as being a "long shot".

We do know for sure that exactly zero aliens will hear our message if we get so bogged down in insoluable mega-calculations that we never get around to building the fucker and giving it a try.

So, with that said, here are the three messages that we are currently working on. Take a look and let us know what you think of them - we will take reader opinion heavily into consideration when deciding what to send.

Orbit Wave
Me and the Kids

Tell us what you think!

If you have any ideas on potential messages or target stars, drop us a line and let us know. We will allocate transmission time to any idea that seems interesting and/or possible and/or fun.

Next: Choosing Target Stars

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