How will we communicate with aliens?

A really cool and insightful article

And another interesting discussion about it in /.

This question has been bugging me for a loooooong time. I am glad I found this debate.

Here's a nice excerpt

Keeping other creatures captive is a sign of intelligence. I remember one SF story I read where 3 people were captured and put in basically an earth zoo. They tried everything to show the aliens they were an intelligent species but everything they tried failed. Finally, once they admitted defeat, they decided to at least make the zoo a bit like home so one of them created a basic cage and caught one of the mice in the zoo to keep as a pet. Once the aliens saw the mouse in the cage they promptly released the prisoners and opened the lines of communication.

The moral, any idiot can make noises (speech) or tap out prime numbers (lots of animals can count, at least subconsciously) but only an intelligent species will imprison what they consider unintelligent.

Another interesting point of view.. The man 's right, why would they talk to us? = Why would I want to deal with someone I think is a criminal or a liar.. and after all, why should I talk to strangers? :-)

One potential problem I think we face is that the potential aliens that we could talk to will have a wide timeframe of technological development. Some of them may be incredibly advanced and maybe already communicating with many other civilizations themselves (call this time C). So the question then becomes, why would they bother listening to us or would they even care what we are saying? On the other hand, there may be life out there, but it might be underdeveloped (call this time B) and cannot even hear us yet.

Although I think that it is highly likely that their are other civilizations out there, I think that the number of such civilizations that we can currently contact that are between times B and C may be small.

Right now the human race seems to think that whatever they say is worth listening too, much like stories posted by people on slashdot, in their webblogs, or this very comment. But sufficiently advanced minds aren't always interested in these things.

So I think a better way to go about it is, what could we send to an advanced civilization that would be interesting to them? Not to us.

I... I regret that it is likely that by the time we encounter alien intelligence, I'll be dead...

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