How to message a Martian

Apparently the first audio message broadcast into space with the ostensible purpose of communicating with aliens was the sound of vaginal contractions in ballerinas. According to Daniel Oberhaus’s Extraterrestrial Languages, the artist Joe Davis beamed the information from an MIT radar installation towards the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani in 1985. A USAF colonel shut the transmission down when he discovered what the content was. Never mind the difficulties of communicating with aliens; sometimes it’s pretty hard to understand what’s going on in the minds of humans.

The question of how we’ll talk to extraterrestrials, as and when we eventually find some, is an old one. Oberhaus, a writer at Wired magazine, finds examples as old as 1638. The protagonist of The Man in the Moone, a novel by Francis Godwin, meets lunar aliens after being flown there by some swans, and is baffled by their language which ‘consisteth not so much of words and letters, as of tunes and uncouth sounds, that no letters can expresse’.

By the 19th century, when the solar system was better mapped out, there were more serious discussions of ways of sending messages to Martians or others: great pits filled with fire, or enormous mirrors to reflect light. The mathematician Carl Gauss proposed building a massive visual proof of Pythagoras’s theorem, a right-angled triangle bordered by squares, out of rows of trees in the Siberian tundra.

Oberhaus explains some of the difficulties of messaging aliens. First, since it’s become fairly obvious that there are none in our solar system, it’s not going to be a case of mutual discovery. When humans learn languages from each other, as children or adults, there is prompt feedback — ‘cow?’ ‘vache!’, and so on. But if we broadcast our message into the cosmos, there’d be no chance of a reply for decades.