Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
... aliens, ... How would we communicate with them? ...
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Some kind of mathematical system would probably work best. To discover signals of extraterrestrial origin beamed out in greetings to other cultures, the late Carl Sagan was an advocate of searching for signals that would not originate in nature, such as pulses that revealed a consecutive list of prime numbers. He felt the prime number method would be the most probable by which extraterrestrial civilizations would say "Hello!" if so inclined. Communications could build from that point, such as the way the video-feed was piggy-backed on the attention signal in the movie
Contact (Sagan wrote the novel on which it was based), but unless other civilizations have discovered some way to get around the issue of the tremendous distances between star systems, such communications would invariable be monologues: replies would take too long. Even if the Alpha Centauri system supported intelligent life (which is extremely unlikely according to the majority of astrophysicists), it would take 9 years for receive a reply to any inquiry beamed from Earth, given the limitations of the speed of light. And that's our
nearest neighbor! Most replies would not come for generations, if at all. The constraints of nature as we know it place a severe limit on the number of possible alien civilizations with whom we could engage in two-way communication.