[LINK] "Astronomers Suggest Crowdsourcing Letters to Aliens"

[rfmcdonald]

Plausible suggestion, this. If you sent me a radio message of 0s and 1s without telling me that they're supposed to resolve into an image with sides made of prime numbers meant to describe schematics of planetary systems and biology, I'd be lost. The Cygnans?

“If I make a presentation on the Keynote software on Mac, you won’t be able to open it on a Windows machine here on Earth,” said physicist Dimitra Atri of the University of Kansas, a coauthor of the new paper. “Forget about sending it to a distant planet.”

The first dispatch, the Arecibo message), was fired in 1974 at a globular cluster 25,000 light-years away. It included a low-resolution graphic of a human, the numbers one through ten, and a graphic of the radio telescope used to transmit the message — though you almost can’t tell to look at it.

“It was largely just for decoration, essentially,” said astrobiologist Julia DeMarines of the International Space University in France, a coauthor of the paper. “It was cool, but it wasn’t really a directed message.”

The next four messages — the Cosmic Calls of 1999 and 2003, the Teen Age Message of 2001 and “A Message From Earth” in 2008 — were sent from a radio telescope in Evpatoria, Ukraine.

Those broadcasts went to more-local stars, between 20 and 69 light-years from Earth, where we could hope to hear back from anyone listening in. But they included recordings of classical music and photographs and drawings submitted by the public — information of sentimental value to Earthlings, but gibberish to aliens who might not even have eyes or ears.

To help increase the odds that E.T. will hear us when we call, Atri, DeMarines and astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra of The Pennsylvania State University suggest designing a standard protocol for writing SETI messages.

“The paper is really a call for unity among thinking about messaging exraterrestrials,” Haqq-Misra said. “Right now it’s messy, it’s kind of all over the place. Maybe we can increase our success chances by being more unified about this.”

The protocol would cover issues like message length (keep it short at first), signal encoding (binary is probably best), transmission method (radio, or some other frequency?) and information content (math and science, or human culture?). The main idea is to keep it simple, the researchers say.

“We want to make sure we’re not being too anthropocentric, making sure the answer can be accessible to the lowest common denominator,” Haqq-Misra said. “Until we meet one, we won’t know” how to talk to them.