ESA’s alien code challenge is critically important. One of the problems of receiving alien communications is pretty obvious – What do they mean? How do you interpret the information?
This is the Decode the Message challenge page.
There are a few issues here:
- You’re not dealing with human logic if it’s a real alien message.
- Language forms will be unfamiliar at best.
- The message probably wasn’t meant for you.
- Frames of reference and subjects will be based on unknown parameters.
- Mathematics will have to include common references, but references to what?
The method of communication may be largely theoretical from the human perspective at the receiving end. You’re receiving a message, the first, and you’re not too sure how it was sent, by whom, or from where, or why. You don’t know if you got the entire message or just a fragment.
Humanity is well behind the eight ball in this field. Leaving out the turgid issues of identifying a genuine alien message, there is no way of interpreting.
…But all communications have their own subjective structures and syntax. If it’s direct communication, you probably have a clear range of points of reference. If not, the subjects could be anything.
You can realistically infer:
A subject.
Information is related to the subject.
Cross-referencing the subject to actions or descriptors.
For example: “The tea is getting cold.” This would be an incomprehensible statement to someone who doesn’t know what tea is. They may not get the reason for using the word “the”, which some languages don’t use. Then they have to figure out that “getting” is a verb. Then they’d have to identify and define “cold” as a physical state to get the meaning.
You’d wind up with “?X=?”, but only if you can identify X as the subject and = as an action statement.
The tea could get a lot colder before you’ve cracked it. That’s why this challenge is so important. Adding perspectives and usage rules to communications is how languages work.
It’s a very good idea in so many ways. Some people have a great talent for codebreaking. Others are experts at learning languages, or deciphering extinct languages.
The other, unstated, benefit is that this work evolves codes, languages, and communications efficiencies by its nature. Modern English is a case in point. It’s the result of constantly refining terminology, ever-changing frames of reference, and slang as a simpler way of describing anything and everything.
You might have to run thousands of these code-breaking exercises to get any level of confidence in interpretation. It’d be worth it. This is a capacity humans simply don’t have, and may urgently need.
Let’s just hope we don’t get someone asking what we think we’re doing listening to their private messages.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
