h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just suppose as is even more likely than the probability put to us in this article, that there are beings out there that are way ahead of us, they have been trying to contact us for as long as we have been around, they have visited our planet and left messages and directions on how to find them. What are the odds of these messages being in English?

About as likely as that our message to them is in English, which is zero. Typically E.T. contact messages use mathematical signals. A series of clicks being a list of prime numbers for example.


**
***
*****
*******
***********
*************


And so on.

If SETI turns up alien commercial broadcasting, commercial advertisements may provide a means of deciphering their language, given the limited kinds of information that go into them, products and services, places and dates and prices, using a process similar to that which allowed deciphering of Minoan linear B script, founded on an assumption that a preponderance of the Minoan scripts represented cargo manifests.

Helps, of course, if one has pictures.

Hal Clement's paradox has a relevance.

He suggested that given the pace of technological advancement, the periods over which two technological civilizations have technologies similar enough to allow for communication may be very brief.

For example, one means of detecting a remote civilization would be to scan for ELF wave noise, since power transmission and communication systems that depend on electrical conduction will inevitably produce a measure of secondary ELF wave noise and ELF waves are very penetrating, going through things which block most electronic broadcasting systems, like rock or earth or water with ease.

Then having detected the ELF wave noise and localized it, one could tune in with more sensitive and higher frequency telecommunications apparatus.

On the other hand, there's currently a trend underway where fiber optics are supplanting electrical conductances and fiber optics do not generate electronic noise.

A move to communications founded on EPR coordination effects would have similar consequences.