Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence


Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence or CETI, is a branch of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that focuses on composing and deciphering interstellar messages that theoretically could be understood by another technological civilization. The best-known CETI experiment of its kind was the 1974 Arecibo message composed by Frank Drake.
There are multiple independent organizations and individuals engaged in CETI research; the generic application of abbreviations CETI and SETI in this article should not be taken as referring to any particular organization.
CETI research has focused on four broad areas: mathematical languages, pictorial systems such as the Arecibo message, algorithmic communication systems, and computational approaches to detecting and deciphering "natural" language communication. There remain many undeciphered writing systems in human communication, such as Linear A, discovered by archeologists. Much of the research effort is directed at how to overcome similar problems of decipherment that arise in many scenarios of interplanetary communication.
On 13 February 2015, scientists at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, discussed Active SETI and whether transmitting a message to possible intelligent extraterrestrials in the cosmos was a good idea. That same week, a statement was released, signed by many in the SETI community, that a "worldwide scientific, political, and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent". On 28 March 2015, a related essay was written by Seth Shostak and published in The New York Times.
In June 2020, astronomers from the University of Nottingham reported the possible existence of over 30 "active communicating intelligent civilizations" in our own Milky Way galaxy, based on the latest astrophysical information.

History

In the 19th century there were many books and articles about the possible inhabitants of other planets. Many people believed that intelligent beings might live on the Moon, Mars, and Venus.
Since travel to other planets was not possible at that time, some people suggested ways to signal the extraterrestrials even before radio was discovered. Carl Friedrich Gauss is often credited with an 1820 proposal that a giant triangle and three squares, the Pythagoras, could be drawn on the Siberian tundra. The outlines of the shapes would have been ten-mile-wide strips of pine forest, the interiors could be rye or wheat. Joseph Johann Littrow proposed in 1819 to use the Sahara as a sort of blackboard. Giant trenches several hundred yards wide could delineate twenty-mile-wide shapes. Then the trenches would be filled with water, and then enough kerosene could be poured on top of the water to burn for six hours. Using this method, a different signal could be sent every night.
Meanwhile, other astronomers were looking for signs of life on other planets. In 1822, Franz von Gruithuisen thought he saw a giant city and evidence of agriculture on the moon, but astronomers using more powerful instruments refuted his claims. Gruithuisen also believed he saw evidence of life on Venus. Ashen light had been observed on Venus, and he postulated that it was caused by a great fire festival put on by the inhabitants to celebrate their new emperor. Later he revised his position, stating that the Venusians could be burning their rainforest to make more farmland.
By the late 1800s, the possibility of life on the moon was put to rest. Astronomers at that time believed in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, which stated that the farthest planets from the sun are the oldesttherefore Mars was more likely to have advanced civilizations than Venus. Subsequent investigations focused on contacting Martians. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli announced he had discovered "canali" on Marsthis was followed by thirty years of Mars enthusiasm. Eventually the Martian canals proved illusory.
The inventor Charles Cros was convinced that pinpoints of light observed on Mars and Venus were the lights of large cities. He spent years of his life trying to get funding for a giant mirror with which to signal the Martians. The mirror would be focused on the Martian desert, where the intense reflected sunlight could be used to burn figures into the Martian sand.
Inventor Nikola Tesla mentioned many times during his career that he thought his inventions such as his Tesla coil, used in the role of a "resonant receiver", could communicate with other planets, and that he even had observed repetitive signals of what he believed were extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars in 1899. These "signals" turned out to be terrestrial radiation, however.
Around 1900, the Guzman Prize was created; the first person to establish interplanetary communication would be awarded 100,000 francs under one stipulation: Mars was excluded because Madame Guzman thought communicating with Mars would be too easy to deserve a prize.

Mathematical and scientific languages

Lincos (Lingua cosmica)

Published in 1960 by Hans Freudenthal, Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, expands upon Astraglossa to create a general-purpose language derived from basic mathematics and logic symbols. Several researchers have expanded further upon Freudenthal's work. A dictionary resembling Lincos was featured in the Carl Sagan novel Contact and its film adaptation.

Astraglossa

Published in 1963 by Lancelot Hogben, "Astraglossa" is an essay describing a system for combining numbers and operators in a series of short and long pulses. In Hogben's system, short pulses represent numbers, while trains of long pulses represent symbols for addition, subtraction, etc.

Carl Sagan

In the 1985 science fiction novel Contact, Carl Sagan explored in some depth how a message might be constructed to allow communication with an alien civilization, using prime numbers as a starting point, followed by various universal principles and facts of mathematics and science.
Sagan also edited a nonfiction book on the subject. An updated collection of articles on the same topic was published in 2011.

Arrival (film)

In 2016, McGill University Linguistics Professor, Jessica Coon, spoke with Business Insider about how 2016 sci-fi blockbuster, Arrival, properly portrayed how humans might actually communicate with aliens. To create this language, film producers consulted with Wolfram Research Founder and CEO, Stephen Wolfram – creator of the computer programming language known as the Wolfram Language – and his son, Christopher. Together, they helped analyze approximately 100 logograms that ultimately served as the basis for the alien language utilized throughout the film. This work, along with many other thoughts with regard to artificial intelligence communication has been documented in an interview published by Space.com. During production, Wolfram's personal copy of Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse was also on set.

A language based on the fundamental facts of science

Published in 1992 by Carl Devito and Richard Oehrle, A language based on the fundamental facts of science is a paper describing a language similar in syntax to Astraglossa and Lincos, but which builds its vocabulary around known physical properties.

Busch general-purpose binary language used in Lone Signal transmissions

In 2010, Michael W. Busch created a general-purpose binary language later used in the Lone Signal project to transmit crowdsourced messages to extraterrestrial intelligence. This was followed by an attempt to extend the syntax used in the Lone Signal hailing message to communicate in a way that, while neither mathematical nor strictly logical, was nonetheless understandable given the prior definition of terms and concepts in the Lone Signal hailing message.
NameDesignationConstellationDate sentArrival dateMessage
Gliese 526HD 119850Boötes2013-07-10July 10, 20132031Lone Signal

Pictorial messages

Pictorial communication systems seek to describe fundamental mathematical or physical concepts via simplified diagrams sent as bitmaps. These messages presume that the recipient has similar visual capabilities and can understand basic mathematics and geometry. A common critique of these systems is that they presume a shared understanding of special shapes, which may not be the case with a species with substantially different vision, and therefore a different way of interpreting visual information. For instance, an arrow representing the movement of some object could be interpreted as a weapon firing.

Pioneer probes

The two Pioneer plaques were launched on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 in 1972 and 1973, depicting the location of the Earth in the galaxy and the solar system, and the form of the human body.

Voyager probes

Launched in 1977, the Voyager probes carried two golden records that were inscribed with diagrams depicting the human form, our solar system, and its location. Also included were recordings of images and sounds from Earth.

The Arecibo message

The Arecibo message, transmitted in 1974, was a 1679 pixel image with 73 rows and 23 columns. It shows the numbers one through ten, the atomic numbers of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, the formulas for the sugars and bases in the nucleotides of DNA, the number of nucleotides in DNA, the double helix structure of DNA, a figure of a human being and its height, the population of Earth, a diagram of our solar system, and an image of the Arecibo telescope with its diameter.

Cosmic Call messages

The Cosmic Call messages consisted of a few digital sections – "Rosetta Stone", copy of Arecibo Message, Bilingual Image Glossary, the Braastad message, as well as text, audio, video, and other image files submitted for transmission by everyday people around the world. The "Rosetta Stone" was composed by Stephane Dumas and Yvan Dutil and represents a multi-page bitmap that builds a vocabulary of symbols representing numbers and mathematical operations. The message proceeds from basic mathematics to progressively more complex concepts, including physical processes and objects. The message is designed with a noise resistant format and characters that make it resistant to alteration by noise. These messages were transmitted in 1999 and 2003 from Evpatoria Planetary Radar under scientific guidance of Alexander L. Zaitsev. Richard Braastad coordinated the overall project.
Star systems to which messages were sent, are the following:
NameDesignation HDConstellationDate sentArrival dateMessage
16 Cyg AHD 186408CygnusMay 24, 1999November 2069Cosmic Call 1
15 SgeHD 190406SagittaJune 30, 1999February 2057Cosmic Call 1
HD 178428SagittaJune 30, 1999October 2067Cosmic Call 1
Gl 777HD 190360CygnusJuly 1, 1999April 2051Cosmic Call 1
Hip 4872CassiopeiaJuly 6, 2003April 2036Cosmic Call 2
HD 245409OrionJuly 6, 2003August 2040Cosmic Call 2
55 CncHD 75732CancerJuly 6, 2003May 2044Cosmic Call 2
HD 10307AndromedaJuly 6, 2003September 2044Cosmic Call 2
47 UMaHD 95128Ursa MajorJuly 6, 2003May 2049Cosmic Call 2

Multi-modal messages

Teen-Age Message

The Teen-Age Message, composed by Russian scientists and teens, was transmitted from the 70-m dish of Evpatoria Deep Space Center in Ukraine to six star systems resembling that of the Sun on August 29 and September 3 and 4, 2001. The message consists of three parts:
Section 1 represents a coherent-sounding radio signal with slow Doppler wavelength tuning to imitate transmission from the Sun's center. This signal was transmitted in order to help extraterrestrials detect the TAM and diagnose the radio propagation effect of the interstellar medium.
Section 2 is analog information representing musical melodies performed on the theremin. This electric musical instrument produces a quasi-monochromatic signal, which is easily detectable across interstellar distances. There were seven musical compositions in the First Theremin Concert for Aliens. The 14-minute analog transmission of the theremin concert would take almost 50 hours by digital means; see .
Section 3 represents a well-known Arecibo-like binary digital information: the logotype of the TAM, bilingual Russian and English greeting to aliens, and image glossary.
Star systems to which the message was sent are the following:
NameHD designationConstellationDate sentArrival date
197076DelphinusAugust 29, 2001February 2070
47 UMa95128Ursa MajorSeptember 3, 2001July 2047
37 Gem50692GeminiSeptember 3, 2001December 2057
126053VirgoSeptember 3, 2001January 2059
76151HydraSeptember 4, 2001May 2057
193664DracoSeptember 4, 2001January 2059

Cosmic Call 2 (Cosmic Call 2003) message

The Cosmic Call-2 message contained text, images, video, music, the Dutil/Dumas message, a copy of the 1974 Arecibo message, BIG = Bilingual Image Glossary, the AI program Ella, and the Braastad message.

Algorithmic messages

Algorithmic communication systems are a relatively new field within CETI. In these systems, which build upon early work on mathematical languages, the sender describes a small set of mathematic and logic symbols that form the basis for a rudimentary programming language that the recipient can run on a virtual machine. Algorithmic communication has a number of advantages over static pictorial and mathematical messages, including: localized communication, forward error correction, and the ability to embed proxy agents within the message. In principle, a sophisticated program when run on a fast enough computing substrate, may exhibit complex behavior and perhaps, intelligence.

CosmicOS

CosmicOS, designed by Paul Fitzpatrick at MIT, describes a virtual machine that is derived from lambda calculus.

Logic Gate Matrices

Logic Gate Matrices, developed by Brian McConnell, describes a universal virtual machine that is constructed by connecting coordinates in an n-dimensional space via mathematics and logic operations, for example: <-- ). Using this method, one may describe an arbitrarily complex computing substrate as well as the instructions to be executed on it.

Natural language messages

This research focuses on the event that we receive a signal or message that is either not directed at us or one that is in its natural communicative form. To tackle this difficult, but probable scenario, methods are being developed that first, will detect if a signal has structure indicative of an intelligent source, categorize the type of structure detected, and then decipher its content: from its physical level encoding and patterns to the parts-of-speech that encode internal and external ontologies.
Primarily, this structure modeling focuses on the search for generic human and inter-species language universals to devise computational methods by which language may be discriminated from non-language and core structural syntactic elements of unknown languages may be detected. Aims of this research include: contributing to the understanding of language structure and the detection of intelligent language-like features in signals, to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The problem goal is therefore to separate language from non-language without dialogue, and learn something about the structure of language in the passing. The language may not be human, the perceptual space may be unknown, and we cannot presume human language structure, but must begin somewhere. We need to approach the language signal from a naive viewpoint, in effect, increasing our ignorance and assuming as little as possible.
If a sequence can be tokenized, that is, separated into "words", an unknown human language may be distinguished from many other data sequences by the frequency distribution of the tokens. Human languages conform to a Zipfian distribution, while many other data sequences do not. It has been proposed that an alien language also might conform to such a distribution. When displayed in a log-log graph of frequency vs. rank, this distribution would appear as a somewhat straight line with a slope of approximately -1. SETI scientist Laurance Doyle explains that the slope of a line that represents individual tokens in a stream of tokens may indicate whether the stream contains linguistic or other structured content. If the line angles at 45°, the stream contains such content. If the line is flat, it does not.

CETI researchers

Some researchers have concluded that in order to communicate with extraterrestrial species, humanity must first try to communicate with Earth's intelligent animal species. John C. Lilly worked on with interspecies communication by teaching dolphins English. He practiced various disciplines of spirituality and also ingested psychedelic drugs such as LSD and ketamine in the company of dolphins. He tried to determine whether he could communicate non-verbally with dolphins, and also tried to determine if some extraterrestrial radio signals are intelligent communications. Similarly, Laurance Doyle, Robert Freitas and Brenda McCowan compare the complexity of cetacean and human languages to help determine whether a specific signal from space is complex enough to represent a message that needs to be decoded.