" Universe signals"

When we send out signals that will hopefully be retrieved by an advanced society is there some kind of special format to these signals that would make them easier to translate and decipher?

Yes. They are carefully constructed to have a form the senders believe should be self evident to an intelligent receiver.

That is an interesting thought. Hard to imagine how they created it.

I wonder what they’ll make of Hitler’s radio broadcasts. They’re well ahead of any decoder ring signals.

Wikipedia has a thorough breakdown of perhaps the most famous of these messages, but note that:

It was meant as a demonstration of human technological achievement, rather than a real attempt to enter into a conversation with extraterrestrials. It has been noted that the low resolution of the image makes it infeasible for any extraterrestrial recipients to attach the intended meaning to most of its elements.
Arecibo message - Wikipedia

Any format we might select for a message would still have arbitrary assumptions about how it could be interpreted; we cannot even assume that a message presented to any particular sense such as sight or hearing would be interpretable to an alien organism which may use entirely difference senses. The attempt with the aforementioned Aricebo message was to create a template that builds up the information aid in interpretation, e.g. it starts with the first ten positive integers, then the atomic numbers of the elements in DNA, and so forth. Would this be meaningful to an alien intelligence? Probably not, particularly if they don’t use our counting numbers (e.g. they use some kind of math based upon statistical distributions or fractals) and have a very different biochemistry. The same is true for any attempt to utilize what we consider to be fundamental constants or values as a basis for communication.

Really, the only thing we can assume about alien life is that it will have some kind of fundamental organizational scheme which uses simple mechanisms that work together to generate and perform more complex functions and emergent behaviors, that it will have some way of encoding and recalling information, and will mediate the flow of energy in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics, e.g. doing work and producing waste to maintain an organizational scheme. From that standpoint it probably makes sense to try to formulate a universal message in some kind of graduated complexity like an Apollonian sphere or Mandelbrot set which seem to be intrinsic in the underlying geometry of nature. How one would go about creating an interpretable message in such a form is an open question.

I’m currently reading Daniel Oberhous’ Extraterrestrial Languages, and while I haven’t gotten very far into it yet he reiterates Minsky’s claim that aliens would necessarily think like us because “the mechanisms of intelligence are objective and are not dependent upon whether a human being or a machine or an extraterrestrial being is doing the thinking.” However, I am not at all certain that this assumption has any basis in evidence. Although almost nobody working in the field of artificial intelligence today would argue that machine learning is true cognition, it is evident that the ways in which these heuristic algorithms “learn” is not readily comprehensible to human researchers; in part due to the complexity of these systems but also because they do not share a fundamental basis in functional structure or evolutionary “design”, e.g. the processes they use to recognize objects visually or interpret natural language are not at all the way the mammalian brain works, and thus they end up producing novel and generally incorrect conclusions that do not seem logical or rational.

I expect the same to be true for an alien species for which cognition may be extremely different and perhaps not even readily recognizable to us. The casual and ubiquitous assumption in science fiction presentations of alien species–from which the general public formulates notions of how alien life would interact–generally assumes what are fundamentally human archetypes in funny-looking bodies, using a grammar and vocabulary through which mental constructs (conceptual models of the world) and abstract concepts (ideas) can be readily translated. This is a conceit that makes the writing or filming of aliens in fiction palatable to consumers but has no basis in fact (naturally, since we have never encountered ‘aliens’ that are not part of the same evolutionary path as us) and is patently unlikely given that the complexity of the mammalian brain (and that of other socially complex creatures like certain aves) is essentially built around social communication and language as there would be no particular reason that aliens with a different evolutionary path and possibly fundamentally different biochemistry would perceive the world in the same way that we do or having mental constructs of how the world works that are analogous to our own. Even if aliens recognize a message as having a defined format and can identify the code of grammar within it, without a common context it is likely that they could not translate anything but the most trivial messages into analogous mental constructs, and no way at all of empathizing or producing common abstract concepts.

Stranger

We sent a Golden Record on Voyager 1. Lets hope Intelligent Life out there are Hipsters with turntables.

Or, as Steve Martin predicted on Saturday Night Live back in the 1970s, they’re fans of early rock and roll:

http://www.elvisblog.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Send-More-Chuck-Berry.jpg

If their concept of communication is not analogous to ours
(non-random energy outbursts), there would be no point in the exercise. We would not recognize their answer, either,