A Cosmic Language
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Transcript: The issue of what message to send if we want to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences is a very interesting one. If the message is too simple, it may be understood but will convey little information. If it’s too complex, it can carry more information, but it’s unlikely to be able to be decoded. So we must avoid anthropocentric thinking. Most of the previous experiments, the Pioneer plaque, the Voyager record, even the Arecibo message, are highly anthropocentric involving the visual sense or anthropocentric views of human artifacts and culture. Other people have looked at a more universal language. Hans Freudenthal developed what he called Lincos or the lingua cosmica, a language that could be digitized based entirely on logic. Other people have speculated that sending complex mathematics ideas in space would be the best way to show that we understood how the universe works. Roger Penrose has extended these ideas to the idea of digitizing and sending into space a universal touring machine which is a binary coded message that shows we know how to construct universal computing engines.
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