Let’s say that we find conclusive proof of an advanced alien civilization on an exoplanet say, five light years away. We want to send them a message. What would it be? I know that the Voyager Disc contains voices and photos and diagrams of this and that, but since we know for certain that we’ll get a response (albeit in ten years), what should we focus on? I say that voices and photos and diagrams are a good starting point, but then we need to try to learn a means of communicating so we can have an honest back and forth. I don’t know how we’d go about that, though. I suppose starting with numbers is a starting point, since any advanced civilization in the universe would, by necessity, use them. Other than that, I got nothing.
And what would we tell them? “We’ve been here for about 200,000 of our years, we’ve been civilized for about 8,000 of them, we’ve been writing shit down for about 6,000 of them, and we just figured out powered flight about a hundred years ago…” also seems like a good starting point.
The classic answer is “We come in peace, and mean you no harm”. Whether they would believe us or just pointing them to a new food source, is anyone’s guess.
Rather than me make the decisions, the communications would be decentralized on our end — and properly so. And unless they have a global dictatorship, it would be decentralized on their end as well.
A lot depends on what we know of their level of civilization. If they are at a similar or higher level of technology than us, why haven’t we received any of their EM signals? At 5 LYs, if they have radio/television/etc. we’d have known by now.
But let’s assume they have and we just weren’t listening in the right way and just figured that out, which is how we detected their existence. If they have not mastered near Light speed or FTL travel, I think it’s safe to reach out and say hello. If they wanted to come and eat us, it’ll take them tens of thousands of years to get here,
I’d tell them that we are violent and self-destructive and have absolutely nothing to offer a truly advanced civilization. I would recommend to them that they keep their distance until we either mature or destroy ourselves.
Okay, given the OP, and the comment that I have the full rights to make the decision, apparently without consequences (a big ask)…
I send them everything… everything we’ve done, everything we’ve learned, our triumphs, our failures, our cultures, our music, everything. It’ll be a long stream and kept up to date for as long as I can manage it. And at the beginning, a personal message: We may have doomed ourselves, I do not know, but if you can learn anything from our successes and mistakes, maybe it’ll be worth something. Remember us or not, but do better if you have not already done so.
Maybe they have workable near-light speed travel and 10 years later the horrible crab monsters come to eat my brains, but well. Them’s the risks. If we can detect them, they can likely detect us if not immediately, probably soon.
We’ve had this conversation a few times. By the orbit of Jupiter, TV signals are indistinguishable from random noise. That’s ~35 light-minutes from Earth. Only 5 more light years to go.
Or said another way, TV transmissions got ~1/75,000th of the way to that other very nearby star.
Since my country is currently at war, this would be an absurd statement.
Not that we are going to fight the aliens. The alien planet is so far away, even at an implausible five light years, that it takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy to get a tiny amount of mass there. So we aren’t going in peace. We aren’t going in war, We aren’t going to eat they. We just are not going. They are not going. All we are doing is communicating. Some of us would communicate praise Some of us would communicate hatred. But I expect it would be all talk.
@PhillyGuy just above …
That in itself is a legit interesting question:
At e.g. 5 LY separation, will two unrelated civilizations at compatible-enough tech levels ever get past mere communication to actually meeting up close & personal?
A pretty good debate can be had over that. If the answer is “no”, how much closer changes that to “yes”?
You cannot have such a hobby today. For one thing, it is necessary to first identify really good candidates for planets like ours. But if we don’t all die, or (more likely) fall back into some new middle ages, amateur SETI is in our future.
Would government SETI, with directional communication capability, succeed before amateur SETI did? Yes. But by the time one or two messages were passed in both directions, there would be amateurs with all sorts of messages and priorities.