A Message to the Stars

For more than 50 years, we've been unsuccessfully searching for any evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Nevertheless, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets where life could have arisen has been a real game-changer and the hope of finding them is much higher than ever before. As first contact with an alien intelligence might become a reality in a not distant future, it's urgent to solve a tricky dilemma never faced before for humankind: how could we communicate with them? Considering that is hardly to imagine what sort of form of life and intelligence they could be like, it's really difficult to compose a message and many questions arise immediately: What kind of universal language could we use to be understood? What should be the content of the message? How could we introduce ourselves to an unknown civilization? Couldn't it be risky to send messages to them in case they were hostile? On behalf of whom we should speak in that message? Among all, the biggest difficulty is to create a common language that could be understood by any form of intelligent life. There's almost a general consensus that language should be based on mathematics, and it was precisely a mathematician, the Dutch Dr. Hans Freudhental, who created a cosmic language called Lincos. To date, this is the only language that has been created with such a purpose. Some scientists believe they might have evolved into some kind of postbiological form of life, some kind of "super artificial intelligence," as they consider that this could be our own evolution here on Earth, so they are thinking of the messages in those complex terms. Despite the difficulty, several messages have been already sent. The first one was designed by Carl Sagan in 1972, and sent into the plaques of the Pioneer 10 and 11. After that one, there were the golden discs onboard of the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 and several radio messages, being the Arecibo message of 1974 the most famous one. Assuming that the closest star system, Proxima Centauri is four light-years away, if we send a radio message towards it, it would take at least another four years to have a response, so the dialogue with any hypothetical alien civilization there would be really complicated. If we think of a star that was at distances of hundreds or thousands of light-years, communication could become almost impossible. Nevertheless, if any of those messages could eventually be decoded and answered in any far, far away star, that could radically transform our consciousness as a species and our place in the universe. We would never be the same.