For centuries human beings have wondered whether or not we’re alone in the universe.

For the past 200 years, we’ve been consumed with the question of how we’d communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence if we actually found one.

Elon Musk is convinced that aliens are real and even joked that he sent a Tesla into space to play David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ for all eternity to confuse them.

That isn’t the weirdest way we’ve tried to make contact, though.

The Guardian looked into some of the strange ways that scientists have tried to capture what humanity is like so that we can communicate it to an intergalactic species.

Burning Maths

Most of the systems designed for interstellar communication have been rooted in mathematics. This is because it’s believed that maths would be understood by any intelligent extraterrestrials. In the mid-19th century, scientists believed that it was necessary to prepare to communicate with aliens on the moon or Mars.

The first such system is attributed to Carl Friedrich Gauss, who developed a scheme “to get in touch with our neighbours on the moon” that involved creating a massive visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem in the Siberian tundra.

He planned to plant trees in the shape of a triangle and fill the middle with wheat. Joseph Johann von Littrow would later propose a plan to dig geometric shapes in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them alight.

Neither of these plans was given the green light.

Giant Mirrors

This one was also a 19th-century effort to connect. Charles Cros petitioned the French government for the funding to build a giant mirror that would use focused sunlight to burn messages into the surface of Mars.

Needless to say, he didn’t get the funding.

Nuclear Bombs

One of the ideas for interstellar communication proposed at the 1971 joint Byurakan conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence involved detonating nuclear weapons.

The extraterrestrial communication proposal floated by the astronomer James Elliot involved detonating the world’s nuclear arsenal on the far side of the moon. In his analysis of Starfish Prime, a powerful nuclear detonation conducted by the US in space in 1962, he calculated that the x-rays from this explosion could be detected at up to 400 astronomical units, or about 10 times the distance of Pluto from the sun.

Yeah, that’s not the friendliest way to communicate.

Intergalactic Cats

At the same conference where it was suggested that we detonate nuclear bombs on the moon, this happened:

Among the various proposals for interstellar messages raised at Byurakan, one especially stands out: Minsky, widely regarded as the father of AI, suggested it would be best to send a cat as our extraterrestrial delegate.

…“Instead of sending a very difficult-to-decode educational message and instead of sending a picture of a cat, there is one area in which we can send the cat itself,” Minsky said. “Briefly, the idea is that we can transmit computers.”

The future of interstellar messaging, according to Minsky would be a mixture of state-of-the-art technology and human culture – not unlike the golden records that left earth for space in the 1970s.

Which brings us to where we are now.

Music

The golden records or ‘Voyager disks’ were basically a mixtape for aliens. They’re also the inspiration for the most recent project designed to represent humanity should we ever encounter extraterrestrial life.

Scientia describes the work of the SETI Institute.

The Earthling project, aims to connect humans around the world through the universal language of music. Charged with the task of creating music that represents us as humans, composer Felipe Pérez Santiago aims to foster collaborative musical compositions that bridge ethnicity, race, culture and geography. Then, with the help of world-renowned astronomer Dr Jill Tarter, these compositions will be launched into space, as a single unified voice that epitomises humanity.

One last word from The Guardian:

Our interstellar messages inevitably reflect human biases and conventions, and may never be seen by an extraterrestrial intelligence. But by continuing to explore the problem of interstellar communication, we can learn a lot about what it means to be human in preparation for the day that we discover we’re not alone.

Many would argue that music is the universal language. Whether life forms from other planets would agree remains to be seen – assuming there are other life forms out there.

The plan to storm Area 51 and get some answers didn’t quite work out…

[sources:guardian&Scientia]