Years ago, several radio signals containing information about the Earth and the human race were sent into deep space. Astronomers hope that someone, or something, will pick them up on the other side of the Universe, and realize that they are not alone. But, while contacting aliens would arguably be the most important thing in the history of mankind, there are some enormous challenges ahead, such as for instance finding a common language, and also subjects of common interest for discussion.
In the hypothetical situation that humans do receive a message from ET, one of the most fundamental decisions would be on what to write back. That, assuming we can decipher its contents first. That is to say, we may understand that a piece of data is of extraterrestrial origin due to its origin and path, but we may have difficulties in understanding what message it codes. The same may work both ways. All messages we send to space, even if already recovered by other intelligent beings, may pose the same problems to them as their messages would pose to us.
All the signals we send are deemed to be very intuitive by the Earth's scientists. But they are constrained by the fact that they are humans and cannot think outside the box completely. The same limitation would apply to extraterrestrials as well. “The challenge of constructing any interstellar message is trying to anticipate what you and your recipient have in common. One thing we can guarantee is they won't be native speakers of English or Swahili or Chinese. It's very reasonable to think that we will know there's an extraterrestrial out there, that we will have a message that is distinctly artificial, but that we won't be able to decipher it,” Douglas Vakoch says.
The expert is the director of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute Interstellar Message Composition division. As such, he has contemplated this question many times over. The expert believes that one of the best starting points would be to use mathematical and scientific formulas, as these are bound to be Universal. It's highly doubtful that an ET civilization would reach the point of development where they are capable of interstellar communications, or traveling, but have yet to discover the basic principles of mathematics.
“We have a lot of problems as a species that we're struggling with. We're not sure if we're even going to survive as a species on our planet. I think a more informative message would be actually to talk about some of the challenges we face because I think that's one of the defining characteristics of our civilization,”
Space quotes Vakoch as saying of what we should write when responding to messages from outer space.
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