Idea to intercept alien communications

DaveC426913

Movies are not meant to reflect realistic expectations; movies are meant to teach us about ourselves. Aliens in movies must have traits that we can empathize with, otherwise the story falls flat. That is, unless they're bug-eyed monsters, in which case, they should be alien and two-dimensional.

But I suspect that what will happen when we encounter intelligent aliens is that they will look neither similar to humanoid nor creepy alien. They will look ridiculous. They will have features that our brains are used to interpreting one way, but will be wholly out of context. They'll have round protrusions, reminiscent of wheels on a car, or markings that make them look like a giant clown face, or a giant smiley. Their appearance will send all the wrong messages to our pattern-matching brains. They will be exactly not the kind of aliens we see in movies. (Who would fear an alien that has a clown nose where its head should be?)

mfb

Communication with specific targets is hard to find - it will be highly directed towards the destination, not broadcasted to the whole space. This saves several orders of magnitude in required beam power (or, equivalent, required receiver antenna size).

If some aliens send messages in our direction, we might find them. This is the concept of SETI.

pgardn

Very true. So we make chimeras of organisms that already exist and call them aliens when in fact they are very familiar. The movies tell me humans do not like things with multiple appendaged mouth parts that drool.

I dont think we will ever encounter intelligent life. We will be long gone. Something will collide with us or we blow ourselves up or poison ourselves. Call me an optimist...

Danger

I agree to an extent, but my post that you quoted wasn't actually intended to address conscious effort to reach another civilization. I was thinking more along the line of "I Love Lucy" and "Milton Berle" being well on their way into the galaxy, both having been aired before we had any thoughts of sending messages to ET's.

Livermorium-K

If there is any intelligent species sufficiently advanced enough to travel here, they are probably intelligent enough not to interfere with our evolution. Although that would make for a good experiment... But what's to say they haven't evolved beyond such things? Perhaps they don't even use mathematics, and that is a primitive form of thinking? Why would they even bother themselves with this planet, anyways?

But if they did contact us somehow for some reason... I personally would like to scout them out first before doing anything. Don't want another apocalypse on my hands, we already have a mechanical one coming up in the next fifty years, as well as a mass extinction event caused by climate change and humans that's already started. :/

If they were friendly, I'd contact them with a message containing everything. All of history, all knowledge from all time periods, all theories, all books, all religions, everything. I'd let them decide whether we were worth their time or not. Which we probably aren't.

ZapperZ

This is no longer a physics discussion. Thread closed.

Zz.