The Ultimate Message in a Bottle
It’s a real challenge to send a message into space that a non-human might understand. Most of the attempts have used numbers, but that can only go so far. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Vakoch: Messages that describe how we can count and describe the basics of music are a nice start. But certainly, they don’t encompass what it is to be human. How do we describe that?
Doug Vakoch is president of METI International, which stands for Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Vakoch: Well, the great thing about mathematics, is that we can use it to describe so many things. Once we can talk about duration, we can also talk about how great a distance we can travel over a certain period of time. And when we talk about distance, we can start talking about the physical space that we live in.
And so as a next step, we’ll be talking about that part of the shared universe that extraterrestrials and humans have in common. Because one thing we’ll know is if we can exchange communication, we know where each other lives. And so we can build up a three-dimensional star chart, describing the universe in our neighborhood pointing to their star and our star, planets that orbit those stars. So we can get a frame of reference that is shared with one another. That’s great for describing our galactic neighborhood, but it’s even more important because it lets us describe anything in a three dimensional space. We can talk about what our bodies look like in that three-dimensional space, and how we interact with one another, day in and day out.
How would you compose a message into space? Let us know on Facebook. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.