Sharing information with Alien Civilizations.

[xclusiv8]

I hope it doesn't go down like that, because the ending saddens me

which part and why?

[Galacticruler]

I am with Holo and Airbornem4.

[Nullspace250]

Wait, What if they were 100 light years away? It will take 100 years, and communication would be hard

[Merinsan]

The problem with images is alien beings will not have the same visible spectrum for their vision, if they even have eyes at all. They could use echolocation for all we know. Speaking of hearing, they might have a very different frequency range of hearing, too.

I'm pretty sure any aliens of sufficient intelligence would be able to perceive the our visual light spectrum in some way, just like we are capable of perceiving infrared etc. While I'm not going to assert this as fact (just my gut feel), I also think that evolution would lead to them being able to see, as it's almost necessary for technology to advance. If we had no perception of light, we would not know about stars, and would not have even gone into space.

[jeti140973]

... Even if the aliens themselves can't translate the message their tech should be able to, regardless of how the information is coded or what medium the original communication used ...

I'm not convinced it would be that easy or even possible.

From

Gödel, Escher, Bach

by Douglas Hofstadter:

Three Layers of Any Message

In these examples of decipherment of out-of-context messages, we can separate out fairly clearly three levels of information: (1) the frame message; (2) the outer message; (3) the inner message. The one we are most familiar with is (3), the inner message; it is the message which is supposed to be transmitted: the emotional experiences in music, the phenotype in genetics, the royalty and rites of ancient civilizations in tablets, etc.

To understand the inner message is to have extracted the meaning intended by the sender.

The frame message is the message "I am a message; decode me if you can!"; and it is implicitly conveyed by the gross structural aspects of any information-bearer.

To understand the frame message is to recognize the need for a decoding mechanism.

If the frame message is recognized as such, then attention is switched to level (2), the outer message. This is information, implicitly carried by symbol-patterns and structures in the message, which tells how to decode the inner message.

To understand the outer message is to build, or know how to build, the correct decoding mechanism for the inner message.

This outer level is perforce an implicit message, in the sense that the sender cannot ensure that it will be understood. It would be a vain effort to send instructions which tell how to decode the outer message, for they would have to be part of the inner message, which can only be understood once the decoding mechanism has been found. For this reason, the outer message is necessarily a set of triggers, rather than a message which can be revealed by a known decoder.

The formulation of these three "layers" is only a rather crude beginning at analyzing how meaning is contained in messages. There may be layers and layers of outer and inner messages, rather than just one of each. Think, for instance, of how intricately tangled are the inner and outer messages of the Rosetta stone. To decode a message fully, one would have to reconstruct the entire semantic structure which underlay its creation and thus to understand the sender in every deep way. Hence one could throw away the inner message, because if one truly understood all the finesses of the outer message, the inner message would be reconstructible.

That sounds fair to me. Now, given that these obstacles are overcome I'm sure it would be possible to communicate in very simple form. Like IQ tests where you setup some simple logical or mathematical task, and expect a given response. Like

- - p - - - e - - - - -

- - p - e ?

And that may give an answer whether you are "communicating" with someone intelligent. That's a simple yes/no question. But "real" communication like telling about yourself, your life, and where you live - or ask another the same thing - is an entirely different thing, and requires some context, I think.

[jebbe]

I'm actually very sceptical about our ability to communicate with alien species. Let's stay on Earth: There are intelligent beings down here on Earth, with complex communication patterns, able to communicate over geat distances, and we have no idea what they could possibly be "talking" about: dolphins and whales. These guys might be just as smart as we are, they grew up in an environment very close to ours, they are even mammals just like us, and yet we do not understand them at all. So how would we ever get around to communicate with somebody that has evolved in a completely different chemical environment?

[Jokurr]

I can't claim to be an expert when it comes to research on dolphins but my understanding was that we have quite a bit of knowledge on how they communicate, and what they are saying to each other. We can identify mating calls, agression in dolphins, hunting patterns, etc. Not only that we are able to train them to do various tasks, that would be impossible if we couldn't communicate with them in some way. We also have enough research to know that they are not nearly as smart as we are. They may be the next smartest creature on the earth after us, but it's a distant second.

[Galacticruler]

Talking with an alien race for the first time would be more like an inter-stellar ink-blot test than a conversation.

EDIT:

but here is how we would know if they were intellegent or not, or that they knew we were:

http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/4182/dolphins-aliens-and-the-search-for-intelligent-life-