2024 will be the 50th anniversary of the “Arecibo Message” we shot out into the stars back in 1974.
To the best of my knowledge, there has been no verifiable response to that message. We have sent several messages out into the stars over the decades, and none have generated a response as far as we know. Some of the smartest people in the world continue on this quest every day using the most advanced technology we have; so one would have to believe that they must know at least something right? If making contact is proving to be very difficult, imagine how hard it is going to be to communicate. As we get closer and closer to contact, the question about meaningful communication becomes increasingly urgent.
As the technologies we have deployed to learn about the universe have advanced in recent years, astrophysicists have been able to discover the past and current presence of water on other planets and / or moons; the prerequisite for life “as we know it”. The probability that at least one of these billions of planets supports intelligent life is good enough to warrant all the time and money being invested.
In March 2022 an international team of researchers headed-up by Jonathan Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published a paper on arXiv.org entitled “A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects,” by Jonathan H. Jiang et al. Preprint posted online March 4, 2022 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The arXiv site is an on-line library holding over two million articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering, systems science, and economics.
The Beacon in the Galaxy article is intended to be an introduction to mathematics, chemistry, and biology as they relate to design of the Arecibo message and other past attempts at contacting extraterrestrials. 
In my Book “Extraterrestrial Communication Code” (ECC); the focus is about finding (not sending) an ET created message and responding to it at the right time, in the right direction and from the correct location. This all means that the scientific community is coming to the realization that we need to change / improve our methods and thinking on this subject.
The Beacon in the Galaxy paper includes a detailed plan for the best time of year to transmit the message and also proposed a dense ring of stars near the center of our galaxy as good target at which to shoot. The proposed transmission includes newly designed instructions intended to help extraterrestrial listeners find us.
“The motivation for the design was to deliver the maximum amount of information about our society and the human species in the minimal amount of message,” Jiang says. “With improvements in digital technology, we can do much better than the Arecibo message in 1974.”
The problem always begins the same simple things. What to say and how to say it? After that, the problem becomes how, when, to where in space and from where on earth do we send the message.
There are some fairly grand assumptions we make about the development
and transmission of our current “Message in a Bottle” approach to establishing contact and then communication with intelligent extraterrestrial life:
- If our message to the extraterrestrials is received by a radio telescope, that life must therefore have similar knowledge of physics and mathematics.
- If item 1 is true then it is reasonable to expect that these extraterrestrials understand prime numbers, binary code and that the concept of numbers is nearly universal.
The way we have chosen to illustrate numerals is entirely arbitrary. This is why many attempts, including “Beacon in the Galaxy,” have designed their message as a bitmap which is a way to use binary code to create a pixelated image. The concept is reasonable however; the messages we have composed and delivered are much too complex. It was scientist Frank Drake that originally developed a binary / bitmap message for the Arecibo transmission in 1974. He sent his binary message in the regular mail to some colleagues which included several Nobel Prize winning scientists. Not a single one of them one of them was able to understand the message. Only one figured out that the binary was meant to be a bitmap. If some of the smartest humans on earth struggled and failed to understand this form of encoded message, how can we expect that an extraterrestrial would do any better. ECC makes this point as it relates to the “Scientific Method”. The Scientific Method demands that we revise the experiment and this is the nuts and bolts of ECC.
Douglas Vakoch is the president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International (METI), which is a nonprofit focused on researching how to communicate with other life-forms. In 2017 Vakoch and his colleagues sent the first interstellar message transmitting scientific information since 2003 to a nearby star. Like all the other messages we have sent, it was coded in binary. This message however, avoided bitmaps for a message design that explored the concepts of time and radio waves by referring back to the radio wave carrying the message. This was a different method largely based on 2003 Cosmic Call broadcast from the Yevpatoriaradio telescope in Ukraine.
The 2003 message featured a custom bitmap “alphabet” created by physicists Yvan Dutil and Stéphane Dumas as a proto-alien language that was designed to be resistant to transmission errors.
After an initial transmission of a prime number to flag the message as artificial, Jiang’s message uses the same alien alphabet to introduce our base-10 numeral system and basic mathematics as a foundation. Then the message uses the spin-flip transition of a hydrogen atom to explain the idea of time and mark when the transmission was sent from Earth, introduce common elements from the periodic table, and reveal the structure and chemistry of DNA. There is more to the message but the point is this: The message is too damn complicated to decode at the other end. It’s like these super smart people just can’t help themselves.
ECC takes a different and fresh approach:
- Trying to generate an original and grossly overcomplicated message into a random location millions of light years away are probably a waste of time for several reasons.
- It is safe to say ETs have visited earth and observed humans. They probably still do. ETs probably left a coded map to where they came from and / or where they went. Humans have always done this here on earth so why would ETs not to the same or similar.
- If we find the code / map and message, then we repeat it back, the ETs will know we found it, understood, it and are capable of communication.
- The ET map / Code presented in ECC includes:
- The message itself that we need to repeat back (2-way communication principal)
- When to send the message with respect to solar events here on earth.
- From where to send the message (a probable wormhole location). The distances are too great to send / receive messages without the use of a wormhole.
The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico was destroyed in 2020. Jiang and his colleagues have proposed sending their message from either the Allen Telescope Array in northern California or the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in China.
The problem with that is both of these radio telescopes are only capable of listening for and not sending messages. Jiang acknowledges that outfitting either telescope with the equipment required to transmit the message would be difficult and costly but it is possible. He says he and his co-authors are discussing ways to work with researchers at FAST do achieve this however; they are not in direct contact with China on this matter at this time.
Let’s assume that someday soon contact is made using the universal language of math. What do we do next? Communicating with math is only going to get us so far. We will need to communicate with these extraterrestrials. It is entirely possible that the intellectual / evolutionary gap is just too big. We can communicate with certain animals on earth to some low level of understanding but there are limits. We can teach a dog or a dolphin to perform certain behaviors for us and they get a reward for doing the trick. We can’t ask a dog or a dolphin to read a book or solve an algebraic expression. These are human creations and we assume aliens are similar to us in this way but what if they are not? People can learn to speak different languages but what if extraterrestrials have evolved beyond audio language. Maybe they communicate telepathically with each other and don’t even have vocal chords. Are we prepared for that contingency – probably not? How worried about his should we be at this juncture? We can’t learn the language of a species we have yet to contact right? Do we really need a special language to communicate with extraterrestrials?
In May of 2018, a radar facility in Tromso Norway focused its antennas on GJ237b, which is a potentially habitable exoplanet approximately 12 light-years from Earth. Over the course of three days, the radar transmitted messages toward this planet. Each message was comprised of a variety of short songs and instructions about how to interpret the message songs.
This was the second iteration of “Sonar Calling GJ273b”, an interstellar messaging project by the nonprofit METI International . This second broadcast was notable for using modified extraterrestrial language developed by the physicists Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas in the late 1990s.
All of the previous formal messaging attempts have taken basically the same approach. Teach numerals and basic arithmetic first. Recent insights in neurolinguistics however, argue that this might not be the best way to attempt communication with extraterrestrials.
The world’s first interstellar communication system, the lingua cosmica, or Lincos, set the standard for all subsequent attempts by placing basic math at its core. Designed by the Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal in 1960, Lincos inspired several other mathematicians and scientists to try their hand at designing extraterrestrial languages. Each system is ultimately an attempt at solving a remarkably complex problem: How do you communicate with an intelligent entity you know nothing about?
The question leads down the path of understanding the nature of intelligence itself. Humans are the only species on Earth endowed with advanced mathematical ability and a fully-fledged capacity for spoken and written language, but are these requirements of intelligence. Is there a common feature of intelligence that is universal? We know that other animals on earth can communicate with each other but it is not the same as human language as far as we know.
Scientists, mathematicians, theologians and scholars have all struggled with these sorts of questions for hundreds of years. Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner once observed, mathematics is “unreasonably effective” at describing the natural universe, which has led a significant contingent of mathematicians to conclude that math is baked into the fabric of reality. From this perspective, mathematics isn’t something produced by the human mind so much as something the human mind discovers.
Most interstellar communication systems were designed around this conclusion. The goal isn’t to teach ETs about addition and subtraction because they already know mathematics. The purpose is for us to show them how humans code numbers as symbols. Then they can build up to more complex ideas.
It is a convenient and defensible solution to a very difficult problem. It all relies on the giant assumption an extraterrestrial is “human-like in the way they think. If in fact extraterrestrials do think in a similar way to humans, do they also have some kind of human-like language?
That was where Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, two of the progenitors of artificial intelligence, landed after they became interested in interstellar communication. 
Both Minsky and McCarthy had a deep interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which they realized had a lot in common with their own search for artificial intelligence. They argued that extraterrestrials are likely to have language because language is an ideal solution to the fundamental problems faced by any intelligent species such as constraints on time, energy, and resources in general.
The more complex question is will their language will be similar to our own. Will their language, however communicated, obey the universal grammar, the hierarchical, recursive structure that linguist Noam Chomsky has argued is the deep structure common to all human languages. Although languages tend to be analogized as a form of software running on the hardware of our brain, recent work in neurolinguistics suggests that language—and the universal grammar—is actually an expression of the hardware itself.
Several brain imaging studies have shown that the deep structure of human language manifests in our neural activity. When people are taught fake rules for either a made-up or real language, their brains respond differently than when they use actual languages (whether familiar to them or not). These findings suggest that the shared attributes of natural languages might be encoded in how neurons connect. In other words, our faculty for language may be inextricably linked to the structure of our brain.
If extraterrestrials do have a language similar to ours, that might imply they also have a functionally equivalent neurobiology. To say aliens might think like us and have language is one thing, but to argue they have brains like ours pushes the concept to the limit but it might not be as crazy as it sounds.
Biology is a slave to the laws of physics, which puts constraints on the trajectory of evolution. Astrobiologist Charles Cockell makes this argument in his recent book, The Equations of Life, in which he points to the remarkable similarities across species on Earth, from the fact that life is cellular and holds the same four nucleotides, to the structure of an eye or a wing. This is not to say that evolution is deterministic as random events like asteroid impacts and genetic mutations still happen, but that the number of evolutionary end points is not without limits.
It is reasonable to expect that an extraterrestrial planet will be quite a bit different from earth, and the species there would have adapted accordingly. The course of evolution however, will still be bound by the same physical laws, and they will face the same fundamental constraints on time, energy, and resources. So it is reasonable to assume that extraterrestrial evolution might arrive at similar solutions to these common problems, such as a brain capable of developing hierarchical, recursive languages.
If that’s the case, then the best way to communicate large amounts of information may not be painstakingly designing artificial languages from scratch, but sending a lot of natural language text, such as an encyclopedia. If ET has developed its own AI, it could potentially decipher the structure of a natural language message.
Natural language processing algorithms on Earth don’t really understand
the meaning of the text they analyze. They are blindly manipulating symbols and aliens may still need some kind of extraterrestrial language to connect some of the symbols of human language to their meaning. But as on Earth, the best way to start an interstellar conversation might simply be saying “hello.”
This article is adapted from Extraterrestrial Languages by WIRED staff writer Daniel Oberhaus. It was released on October 22 by MIT Press.
References
- Daniel Oberhaus. Researchers Made a New Message for Extraterrestrials. Scientific American. March 30, 2022
Daniel Oberhaus is a science writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was previously a staff writer at Wired covering space exploration and the future of energy. His first book, Extraterrestrial Languages (MIT Press, 2019), is about the art and science of interstellar communication.