Found this enlightening (from over at badastronomy.com). The last thing we need is to send a picture of a soup can great distances only for them to think it's our god (or worse, a threat of invasion).
Quote:I am not an artist, though I appreciate art. I like some types, I don’t like others, just like most humans. There’s a great deal of art I don’t understand, which itself is understandable: art is a way of expressing what is happening inside one’s mind.
We all have different experiences, making a complete understanding of a piece of artwork impossible. But we have enough similar experiences that the work will translate– it will just touch us all in a different way. It may even invoke a reaction totally unanticipated by the artist, but this is part and parcel of what makes art, well, art.
So when an artist says something like this, I have to react:
If I were [ET] trying to communicate with beings elsewhere in the universe…I’d try to express something about myself in the most universal language I could imagine: I’d send art.
My reaction? This guy is a goofball.
Art is the least universal communication method there is. It changes from person to person. Heck, it changes even in one person; I listen to Tchaikovsky as well as ABBA. It’s difficult to understand art from another culture without first knowing something about that culture — scholars still argue over the meaning of cave art from tens of thousands of years ago, and those guys were still human. This pretty much precludes understanding alien art, especially if it is sent via radio from another star without any sort of lesson in alien sociology. And even if it does invoke a reaction in us humans, it almost certainly won’t be what the aliens had in mind.
Have no doubt, art is part of what it is to be human. That cave art I mentioned indicates that there was something different about the creatures who drew it over their ancient ancestors. Animals, it seems likely, don’t grasp metaphors, and seeing the Universe metaphorically is what art is.
Metaphors depend on their context. I suspect that even if aliens had art, we wouldn’t even recognize it as such.
The Universal language, if there is such a thing, is the language the Universe itself speaks: math. The symbols might change, but the relationships (like gravity dropping off with the square of the distance, and the peak wavelength emitted by a star depending linearly on temperature) are true everywhere.
I’m not trying to be a soulless scientist stereotype here; like I said, I have my own eye for art (I recently discovered Leonardo Nierman, and if anyone wants to buy me one of his paintings, there was a version of "Firebird" I saw in a gallery in New Orleans for only $15,000). Art is a way of expressing our desires, our fears, our human qualities… which is precisely what makes it such a terrible way to try to communicate with aliens.
There’s a poetry in the idea of using art to communicate that appeals to our emotion, but poetry just won’t work as a way to initiate contact. Binary streams of ones and zeros may seem cold and heartless… but aliens may in fact have lower body temperatures and no hearts.
I disagree, but that's because I appreciate aesthetics over hard logic.
Most of what I disagree with is the notion of our inability to recognize alien art as art. That's an impossibility, because art is a very nebulous concept, and on many levels, mathematics and art are very intertwined. I have no doubt that, no matter what form a hypothetical message comes in, some people will view it as artistic, and others will examine it with a microscope.
I believe that an ideal contact would showcase both aspects of our communicative skills.
Oh sure exchange of artistic expression can come later, but yeesh there's no point introducing yourself in a way that may not even be understood. The guy makes all manner of good points about how hard it is for us to even be consistent with our own personal views of what art means. Art requires some sort of social and mental framework to make sense.
Best stick with math.
Or, you could just watch Lobo be the main man.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9ooZYjF0mI
(I'm pretty sure I do NOT want to send this as an initial greeting to aliens.)
Again, I would have to disagree.
If we're dealing with a species with an intelligence that is roughly similar to our own, chances are, there is going to be some kind of artistic symmetry, and as we all know, people tend to find artistic value in practically everything.
So, I say, send a message in basic binary and also one that can be interpreted as a purely visual cue. An image of a contemporary painting of, say, the constellations visible from Earth would be something that a space-conscious alien society would likely recognize. Maybe so, and maybe not, but there's no guarantee said civilization would recognize binary code, either.
Math isn't the answer, in the natural world animals use math on a subconscious level and higher mammals and birds grasp it much quicker and easily than human beings, the entire reason math causes so much activity in the brain is because you're taking a natural function in to the conscious state, we're just applying symbols to it. So logically the best route is to attach symbols such as simple shapes, triangles, circles, etc. Then move on in to colors and eventually move in to preparing some type of communication possibly with a combination of sounds where a question can be asked and answered using symbols, colors and sounds and then move in to math once the idea of symbols with meaning is understood.
Of course the alien intelligence will try his own methods as well which depending on his eye structure, vocalization structure (if any) and components of the brain which may be so vastly different we wouldn't know where or how to start, I mean we just found out recently that elephants communicate using ultra sub-level frequencies that can only be heard by other elephants and specialized instruments, so the odds of us being able to communicate with an alien life form that evolved for millions of years on its own planet that has no mammal/avian/etc families nor the base structures of proteins and common elements (such as carbon) are slim to none. We can barely teach other mammals to do anything beyond tricks yet we factually know that dolphins have a vocabulary 300 thousand times larger than any known language so I dont put much faith in our communication skills.
as for art, if you strip away everything but its purpose it becomes stupid and superficial. We're a visually based creature and we have simple brains in that if we look up to something, or otherwise have a positive feeling towards a person or object we depict it as such. If Jesus christ actually existed he more than likely smelled really bad, had about 10 teeth, scortched skin, you name it, but because of his positive messages and his likability we depict him as an almost female-likeness in his phisical beauty which is obviously rediculous considering the time period and the fact that he's middle eastern and living in a desert. In the case of the cambells soup painting the alien beings would not understand on any level the hidden meanings of its subtext, the move from family to factory, the 'mom's homemade love' to 'condensed canned soup' and the ideal of companies selling our memories back to us in an artifical way, they would see a picture of an object and attach their own meaning to it which is actually the entire reason art is so widely accepted however it would fail to communicate any ideals.
Having said that, simple art (such as combos of colors) would be effective in expressing feeling or emotion. Every planet with life has sunsets and sunrises, multiple colors of stars, a black night sky, frozen condensation, pools of water, etc so these are all things we would both understand. But if they dont see in colors or see outside our spectrum of visible light or have no eyes at all or even more likely have a brain structure so vastly different where the ideal of 'art' has no purpose to them, it would be a wasted attempt. The only reason we create art is so that we can attach meaning to something and in the natural world that's just meaningless.
Well someone gets it.
Art is a great thing but yes as we express it it is pretty distinctly specific not just to humans but to individuals. If we are going to announce "we are here", we need to use the language that is universal, some expression that is likely to be seen for what it is everywhere. Only thing I can think of is physics. Drop off rate of gravity is the same everywhere, even if the gravity of their world is greater the drop off rate is the same. So, we need the impersonal touch.
Since when is binary mathematics universal? It's the simplest form of decision-making we know of - yes or no - but who is to say an alien culture would understand what we call binary mathematics any greater than they would understand what we call art?
Send them a picture of Bo Jackson. They'll understand.
Good idea. And then, we can fire a nuke at them, just to show them we meant it.
The fact is we know exactly what sort of math we can expect, no matter how it's expressed. Ever see that movie with the people who went to mars and found the big stone face and all that insane garbage? Well they got one thing right. Remember seeing those symbols going through their courses on the floor? Those were not very clear at all, but it didn't matter. Just watching them for a few seconds it was immediatly clear that not only was it a binary counting thing, it was counting down.
That's the sort of thing we can do. We can send "pulse... pulse pulse.... pulse pulse pulse pulse..." (and so on up to 256 or whatever) and it'll be pretty clear to any intelligence. From there you can send fibbernachi sequences, mathematical constants of the universe, and so on. Mathematical sequences are very easy to translate, as opposed to language (look at how long it took to translate egyptian), so we can explain to them very clearly exactly what we know at this point, and perhaps some other mathematical details about us as a species, that'll explain things in more detail and more accuratly than any art could. We could explain via science exactly who we are as we currently understand ourselves and that'll help them a LOT more than artistic expression. Art is an abstraction after all. We could send the art after telling them how we understand our mind to come up with such things and then they could look at that, and MAYBE get an idea of what it means.
The fact is, for them to get to the technological level to intercept our messages, they HAVE to know certain things we know. They couldn't build such things otherwise. That is the stuff we have to send, because what they do NOT have to know is how to make a story that is engaging to the human brain or a song that speaks to our particular rythm recognition programming, or especially a poem that represents certain aspects of a specific society on our planet.
I should have posted this in debate. I had no idea people would actually disagree with this.
Quote:We can send "pulse... pulse pulse.... pulse pulse pulse pulse..." (and so on up to 256 or whatever) and it'll be pretty clear to any intelligence.
As we have never encountered any intellegence, ever, even remotely like our own, wouldn't you think that's, at best, a hopeful assumption?
It's quite reasonable to imagine that another intelligent life form, even one at a level of advancement close to our own, might never recieve such a transmission, our would, and view it as nothing more than gibberish, because they have a system of communication so radically different from anything we've conceived?
I mean, if you're going to dismiss art because of such things, you can't assume binary is going to be any easier to interpret. That makes you as guilty of limited perception as I am.
It might even be reasonable to believe that another form of life similiar in intelligence to our own would not even use light or sound as a source of transmission/communication. They might have a hyper-evolved sense of smell and are able to produce intricate olfactory sensations to transmit thoughts and words. Or they might have huge brains that send out some kind of brainwaves that we can't even begin to imagine or measure. In either cases, a radio signal might be just a complete waste of time.
Even if they could recieve such transmissions, we also have to assume that they have the same kind of comprehension of mathematics and counting as we do. What we percieve as the ultimate truth of math might well be only one way of doing things and another intelligent race, based on how they develop may well find some other form of such fields that is entirely unknown and incomprehensible to us.
That's also assuming that they even use math and numbers in the same way that we do. Their ideas regarding such fields may have developed in ways that we can't begin to understand because to us math is one thing and one thing only and that's the way it's always been, but suppose there's some OTHER way of using math that we never found because we never looked for it or maybe because we don't even know HOW to look for it.
Again, we can't just assume that any alien race we come across will have developed in such a way to allow us to communicate with them simply because we know absolutely nothing about them.
Like GR said, the pulsing sounds are just that, there are plenty of natural things in the universe that produce consistent sound waves or some other form of energy in a manner that might make you think it was created by an intelligence, the idea of an artificial creation being picked up would be random at best since, like for example our own research stations like SETI, use man-made instruments to pick up known energy sources. I dont think it's far fetched to say that an alien not only wouldn't be able to tell our sounds of bleeps and frequencies from everything else out there nor that our known methods of producing audible transient energy could even be picked up by there technology or even there own ears... if they even have anything like an ear.
things like SETI are picking up forms of energy that we understand, but is it picking up the echoes of dark matter or other plausible theoretical forms of energy and substance? Not in the slightest, simply because we dont have the knowledge yet. But I think push come to shove the idea of finding the existence of a planet would mean to someday explore it in some fashion so time will tell. We could be in the middle of a massive alien research study that's been in effect for a hundred years but because they dont exist as we do they could just be seeing an anamoly in space that barely resembles a planet. Or communicate and understand on such a totally different level that the idea of human beings or other animals aren't even considered to be living things or worth the time trying to communicate, much like how we view the microcosmos.
Symbols and what not are definitely the way to go the problem is getting it to them to start the communication, and you cant beat having a giant blue sphere of life in the middle of a dead solar system as a beacon to the aliens saying 'LAND HERE'. As far as their probability of existing I think it's fair to say that if it happenned once it can happen again, and if the ratio is something like that for every ten planets one will hold life, then there are trillions of planets with life through the unknown and known universe. All we can do is keep trying and assuming that they can even begin to understand us. sometimes i wonder about solar flares or magnetic interference being a form of communication using what they believe to be a very common element that all living things would understand, but all we do is complain about the TV getting fuzzy or our dropped call, we could be bombarded with alien greetings every second of every hour and have no idea how to even prove if its there or not.
here's what i'd do: launch the Statue of Liberty in to deep space towards the nearest galaxy with a note that says "If found, please return to Planet 3 (or 7 depending on your direction, just look for the contenent shaped like a boot), sector 0.0, map and DS Lite w/English Training enclosed -- if you're evil or ugly we'll kill you. sincerely, Humanity." and wait it out.