Episode #13
How ALIENS Might Talk to Us
So what would actually happen if aliens tried to contact us? Not the Hollywood version where a giant ship just shows up over a city. I mean if an extraterrestrial civilization somewhere out there actually wanted to communicate with humanity, how the hell would we even begin to understand each other? In this episode, we go through the work of Lambros D. Callimahos and his ideas surrounding communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Basically, how an alien civilization could potentially send us a message that slowly teaches us how to decode it. We get into using things like numbers, patterns, geometry, binary images, scientific constants, the hydrogen line, and eventually building those basic concepts into something that could resemble an actual shared language. And this is where it gets really interesting, because the idea isn't that we would already somehow understand what they're saying. The message itself could potentially be designed in a way that gives us the tools to figure it out as we go. We also get into what an actual conversation with another civilization would even look like when they could be hundreds or thousands of light-years away. This was one of those episodes where we started with "how would aliens talk to us?" and ended up going way deeper than we expected.
