Third degree contact. Three words which can probably make a lot of people laugh. But this is no laughing matter; just look around you, we're not living in an isolated area, we're living in a universe, billions of light years across, with billions of galaxies and stars and most likely intelligent life as well. Wake up, ET is as real as you and me! There is a good chance that at the time of contact, if such event will ever take place, we would meet a much more intelligent species than us.

First of all, we are not that old a species as we tend to believe. In fact, the human species is only about 160,000 years old. Corroborate that time with human history and you realize that it could only take as little as a decade to destroy millions of years of evolution. Assuming that our theory is correct and intelligence is in direct relation with age, then we can understand why we are currently scanning the sky for alien radio transmissions instead of sending radio messages into space.

How do we make contact?

On the other hand, a radio transmission now would be rather useless. We've made ourselves quite noticed throughout the near solar systems with the radio and television transmissions we've been sending into space for more than half a century, considering that the signals wouldn't have been altered by interactions with interstellar clouds of matter. Secondly, the distances in the universe are so large that it disables the possibility of instant information exchange.

Let's take for example the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, lying only 4.4 light years away from Earth. If intelligent alien life would exist there, it would take roughly a decade just to become aware of each other, sadly no sign of intelligent life exists in Alpha Centauri, and lets not forget that this is only the closest star to us. Communicating with other life beings in the universe through radio signals is just unpractical.

But even if it would be? What would we say? Teaching them physics, mathematics or astronomy wouldn't do us any good. Presuming that they are more intelligent than we are, then they would surely know much more physics than we do. The natural fear when talking about alien contact is that, no matter what we would say, it could look to them as a boring subject and make them quickly lose interest in us, as we all know that humans are notorious in trying to impress strangers.

What to say?

Lewis Thomas, author of the book 'Lives of a Cell' argues that if we really want to impress our visitor, the first thing we might want to do is show us our civilization, our art, music in special. In fact, when the Voyages spacecraft was sent into space, it carried a message for possible extraterrestrial life encounter. Three of the 27 pieces written by Bach.

A more balanced approach would be to create a presentation of our qualities but of our imperfections as well, or some kind of a description of our primitive knowledge could attract them. SETI Institute and the Leonardo Network, artist Richard Clar believes that interstellar messages containing a three dimensional representation of the human body, biological structure and developments in science could offer ET the understanding of our rudimentary level of accomplishments and an interest in our civilization.

Perhaps a short history of mathematics would be more persuasive. They would surely know the formula defining the circumference of the circle, c = 2pr, with r bing the radius, c the circumference and p is pi. It might just surprise them how we know the estimated value of pi, which is an infinite number, however we can still make accurate predictions based on that. For example, in ancient times people estimate pi to be equal to 3. However, we know today that this is not completely true; in fact pi, as we know it today, is 5 percent larger than the number 3 - 3.14159..., a remarkable example that we are trying to perfect ourselves to make continuous advancements in science.

Presenting ourselves as perfect or as a superior being, could be quite insulting. The fact is we are far from perfect, and may never become perfect, but presenting ourselves as we really are would be the most admirable thing to do, from our point of view at least.

But then there is the other part of the story. What if having evolved enough, ET would simply have no use of our humanly imperfections, consider us inferior and simply ignore us? What would really happen in the eventuality of a contact, nobody knows. We'll just have to wait and see how nature takes its course.