by mike

I didn't know about some of these attempts to communicate with aliens... sending theremin music has got to be the "classiest." I hope they're not offended. The Atari-like encoding is a bit better, but still... it's a stretch to think anyone's gonna make sense of that.

It did get me thinking though... what kind of message would you send? For this thought experiment, suppose we follow the suggestions and sweep out portions of the sky on the regular basic at common frequencies likely to be noticed. Add a "Contact"-like header of bursts of signals representing the prime numbers to get attention, and then follow with the message.

What would its form be? A binary encoding? What would the message be? Intention? Form? What clues could you include to help with the decoding?