interstellar-message-design
The process and challenges involved in creating messages that can be understood by extraterrestrial intelligences, exemplified by Frank Drake's 551-bit binary message.
1 chapter across 1 book
Extraterrestrial Languages (2019)Daniel Oberhaus
This chapter traces the historical and conceptual development of messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), beginning with Frank Drake's 1961 binary message experiment which highlighted the challenges of creating universally comprehensible interstellar communication. It also explores premodern attempts and ideas about communicating with extraterrestrials, including Renaissance and nineteenth-century proposals by figures like Frances Godwin and Carl Friedrich Gauss, emphasizing the longstanding human fascination with and difficulties in designing a universal language for alien contact.