I've always thought ideas like these to be cool exercises, but ultimately so naive.
It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or that an extraterrestrial being would care about conversation at all, instead of exchanging information via other means, like direct chemical reactions, genetics, or apparent random noise, and expecting us to pick all the implicit signals?
I bet we wouldn't be able to recognise certain life forms if they literally appeared before us, because we have such strong biases of what "life" looks like - we can't even reach consensus over viruses being life forms, despite being gene-based, following natural selection, etc. Let alone "intelligent life forms" or anything else that a virtually infinite universe could throw at us.
PS: Maybe my notion of "extraterrestrial" has been deeply influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. :D
I think it's quite probable that even if some entity or group finds linear sequences of symbols unnatural, if they're smart enough to pick it up they're also smart enough to piece together the meaning the hard way, the same way we would if presented with something very foreign. Any technological entity has encountered and mastered lots of foreign systems, including us. Biochemistry, quantum mechanics, heck, even classical mechanics don't come to humans naturally, but we're getting by pretty well anyway.
As for recognizing life, eh, I don't think it's an accident that we're carbon-based blobs of relatively flexible, mobile matter. If there was a more likely template, that's probably what we would be based on instead.
Our definition of "intelligence" is overfit for humanity. There's no reason why an alien civilization have any interest in linear sequences.
The way I see it, any communication system that doesn't make it possible to communicate with starfish won't make it possible to communicate with aliens either.
Well, radio communication is serial (and even television signal is encoded as a linear sequence). Looks like serial protocols are the most natural, simple, and reliable of all. And do not forget about the natural numbers!
Lots of natural phenomena are "serial" just due to entropy. Radioactive decay, friction, even pulsars are going to tell intelligent species that things happen sequentially in the time domain.
We don't need to worry about completely unintelligible (to us) Lovecraftian aliens. If they exist and are even interested in looking for alien life themselves they'll have equally unintelligible (to us) methods and motives.
Life on Earth is varied but has a couple common characteristics. It's not coincidence Earth life is carbon based. Carbon is pretty common, a lot of organic chemistry involves similarly common elements but also offers the complexity to build some really specialized molecules. It's more probable than not that carbon based life is one of if not the most common chemistries.
Water is also pretty important for life on Earth. This is also not a coincidence as water is a very interesting molecule. It's a mild solvent so it enables a lot of chemistry to occur. It's composed of plentiful elements and is found throughout the universe. Other molecules have similar properties but most are more complex and aren't quite as versatile as water.
We are concerned with alien life that is at least somewhat like our own. We're interested in species (should they exist) that recognize the utility of radio any optical astronomy. Cthulhu may not give a shit about radio astronomy but that doesn't matter.
The universe is filled with radio emissions, any intelligent species that discovers electrical theory will end up being able to detect it. Natural radio emitting phenomena tend to be temporally cyclic. So even if a particular species doesn't think "linearly", lots of phenomena are linear in the time domain. Their radio astronomers might find it weird but they'll know linear events exist and have a way to express them.
So radio is a pretty good medium to send messages. Messages encoded in the level of math needed to understand electrical theory well enough to build radio telescopes will likely be intelligible by those telescope builders. The same "linear" understanding species would need to understand pulsars or radioactive decay will let them understand linear intelligent signals.
Interstellar communication is likely to only be one-way but there's some common denominators that logically fall out of the effort. They won't work for every kind of species that could exist but you don't need to target every possibility, just a reasonable subset.
I remember, when I was a child I asked my parents (both are chemists), about what the most powerful solvent is. To my suprise they answered: water.
Wow, that can be true, it is everywhere, I tought...
It is somewhat a point of view question, considering that there are different categories of solvents - it is like asking a biologist about the most dangerous animal: human - of course! But that can't be true, humans are everywhere and I'm still alive.
These kind of suprises happens if you do not specify the questions exactly (Dangerous to what and how? Solving exactly what kind of things?)
edit: it is natural to think, that something is mild and friedly (in general) - if you are made of that...
I called water a "mild" solvent because it's not so reactive as to instantly destroy everything in its path. But in terms of solubility water can act as a solvent for more molecules than anything else (if I remember high school chemistry correctly). This makes it a great medium for moving solutes around and facilitating interesting chemistry.
It seems to me there are at least some assumptions we can safely make about communication if there's any possibility of communication at all: the bit as the basic unit of information, sequential ordering, counting, etc. If aliens don't have this in common with us then there's probably no hope at all that we could recognize each other, let alone communicate.
It would be surprising if all extraterrestrial civilizations were uninterested in linear, sequential communication. All we need for Lincos to work is for some of them to get it.
Yes, there is likely a genetic basis to human language structure, and to expect it to be intelligible by aliens is a big assumption. Very little of our science fiction deals with intelligent but bizarre aliens.
From Gödel, Escher, Bach, chap. 6, Douglas Hofstadter:
> In these examples of decipherment of out-of-context messages, we can separate out fairly clearly three levels of information: (1) the frame message; (2) the outer message; (3) the inner message. The one we are most familiar with is (3), the inner message; it is the message which is supposed to be transmitted: the emotional experiences in music, the phenotype in genetics, the royalty and rites of ancient civilizations in tablets, etc.
> To understand the inner message is to have extracted the meaning intended by the sender.
> The frame message is the message 'I am a message; decode me if you can!'; and it is implicitly conveyed by the gross structural aspects of any information-bearer.
> To understand the frame message is to recognize the need for a decoding-mechanism.
> If the frame message is recognized as such, then attention is switched to level (2), the outer message. This is information, implicitly carried by symbol-patterns and structures in the message, which tells how to decode the inner message.
> To understand the outer message is to build, or know how to build, the correct decoding mechanism for the inner message.
> This outer level is perforce an implicit message, in the sense that the sender cannot ensure that it will be understood. It would be a vain effort to send instructions which tell how to decode the outer message, for they would have to be part of the inner message, which can only be understood once the decoding mechanism has been found. For this reason, the outer message is necessarily a set of triggers, rather than a message which can be revealed by a known decoder.
I've always been interested in Freudenthal's work, although I've never had the time to work through the book in detail. A second volume was planned but never finished. That's such a pity, because in that volume he planned to formalize interesting social concepts.
Anyway, it's a must read for anyone interested in communication with aliens. I believe it would work, and his way of distinguishing between false and wrong is ingenious. The book is unfortunately hard to get, but there are digital copies around. Good reading if you don't shy away from some old-style Carnap-inspired logic notation.
I've always been interested in constructed languages, but reading through this article just now made me wonder about curriculum learning for NLP models. Could better generalizable language models be achieved through curriculum learning of this sort, where simple mathematics and logic are introduced before anything else? The curriculum learning papers I've seen so far are mostly for specific tasks, like introducing simple questions for QA tasks before more complicated multi-hop reasoning.
> In 1999, the astrophysicists encoded a message in Lincos and used the Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope in Ukraine to beam it towards close stars. This is known as Cosmic Call.
Apparently one of my all-time favorite bands is named after the message sent in this message, The Evpatoria Report. I haven't listened to them in a while, so it was a nice reminder seeing this.
This is much like the premise of the pre-contest materials for this year's ICFP contest. A series of images (as decoded from audio) that translated into examples of numbers, math/logic operators, and combinators.
Re natural numbers, people in our society (a technicist one) seem to forget that "natural numbers" are actually a social construct, there's nothing "natural" about them, they're not "innate"/"pre-existing" in a Platon-like universe of ideas, they only helped us from some-point on to do some technicist stuff (from collecting taxes in Roman times to sending rockets to the Moon in the 1960s) but I'm not sure that the Universe as a whole "cares" so much about them.
We as a species did have the opportunity at some point in our past of not "choosing" the natural numbers way (and of not choosing the principle of non-contradiction more generally speaking), I'm talking about Heraclitus and presumably some other of his disciples, but we chose not to.
As such, we could "meet" an alien society which has chosen the Heraclitus way, or any other way that doesn't involve "separating" stuff into "units" (like natural numbers are), or of thinking about the Universe as "stuff", or any other idea/concept that is not currently in use by our society. In which case all this trouble would have been for nothing, only helps with our existential solipsism as a species.
Those aliens could have then asked, similar to Parmenides: where does a star "end" for you to be able to "count" it as a separate entity? From the wiki page [1]:
> and thus despite appearances everything exists as one, giant, unchanging thing
The pre-socratics were a very interesting bunch, again, it's a social-constructed presumption to think that those possible aliens have all chosen the way of Aristotle and Platon like we did.
It's not clear where the Solar system ends, and it's not clear where a star ends. There are several criteria and they give different numbers. But they have all the same order of magnitude that is much smaller than the distance between the stars. For most orbital calculations you can take the star as a single point, and assume that the space is empty. Aliens probably had done a similar approximation and can count star easily.
As long as they actually understand the message, you can include a way to correct any shift by relating the second back to a fundamental constant; like the voyager golden record does with the hydrogen transition time.
It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or that an extraterrestrial being would care about conversation at all, instead of exchanging information via other means, like direct chemical reactions, genetics, or apparent random noise, and expecting us to pick all the implicit signals?
I bet we wouldn't be able to recognise certain life forms if they literally appeared before us, because we have such strong biases of what "life" looks like - we can't even reach consensus over viruses being life forms, despite being gene-based, following natural selection, etc. Let alone "intelligent life forms" or anything else that a virtually infinite universe could throw at us.
PS: Maybe my notion of "extraterrestrial" has been deeply influenced by H. P. Lovecraft. :D