Decoding Alien Messages Could Be the Biggest Citizen-Science Project Ever

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | May 26, 2018 01:27 pm ET

An experiment performed recently by Wells-Jensen shows why we may need the power of the human hive-mind. She presented college students with several puzzles that had been coded in the manner of Lincos, a constructed language designed to be understood by intelligent extraterrestrials. The students figured out the simple stuff, such as basic mathematical functions, quite well — but things got dicey when the concepts got more complicated.

For example, Wells-Jensen gave the students the equation for the circumference of a circle, as well as a lightly coded representation of "pi" (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter).

"And I said, 'OK, what is this real word?' And they came up with all kinds of crazy things," she said. "Some made poetic jumps and said, 'world'; some of them made an opposite poetic jump and said, 'infinity.' Some of them thought that I meant that the diameter of the circle ended at a wall, and said 'prison.'"

And that's for a message drawn up by a fellow human. It will doubtless be much tougher to decode something devised by creatures from a distant solar system who share no cultural or evolutionary history with us, who may rely upon different senses to perceive their environment and to communicate, and who are probably far more advanced technologically than we are.

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[TimeSnowDemos]

1. Exactly

I love how in all movies ONE person figures out the alien message. Just someone on their own looking at a computer screen... bam!

[3Hotdogs]

2. The first thing they will ask is, "Take me to your leader." When they are shown the orange turd,

they will think their decoder is broken and future efforts at communication will decline from that point.

[JayhawkSD]

3. One phrase takes this out of "science" and into fiction.

"...a constructed language designed to be understood by intelligent extraterrestrials."

We have no possible way to have any concept of what would be understood by intelligent extraterrestrials. This "Lincos" belongs in a science fiction move for Star Trek fans, not in anything that purports to be a scientific discussion. I'm thinking of charging this guy for my BS meter that he broke.