I came across a blog entry about two clever physicists who developed a series of pictures in 1999 and sent them into space in the hopes of being translated by aliens.

As such, they had the interesting problem of how to convey information to beings with whom we have no common language, assuming they even have similar visual and cognitive processes.

The images themselves were sent as radio-wave bitmaps of ones and zeros to promising solar systems. They spend a lot of their time defining symbols for different concepts like all the digits of our base-10 number system, mass, Earth, etc.

After showing some of mankind’s knowledge, we tell them a lot about ourselves in an attempt to allow them to reply and ask them questions about themselves.

It’s pretty fun to put yourself in the aliens’ shoes and decode, though I got lost once they started talking chemistry.

The whole thing reminded me of Gödel, Escher, Bach, which I remember having a section on the difficulties of talking with aliens. Also Manhattan Transfer, which had this cute part explaining the trouble with all the assumptions humanity uses in its communication.

Take, for example, an alien coming across the license plate “I ♥ NY”. To understand the “♥,” you would need to discover that it is (1) a stylized version of a human heart, (2) seen as a storage medium for something we call “emotion,” particularly of the romantic sort, and (3) associated with a strong bond of attachment. To understand the “NY,” you would need to grok our abbreviation system, identify it as one, scan popular NY abbreviations for a likely match, and finally figure out whether it refers to the state or city. Then of course, you need to lookup “I,” parse our grammar, and realize that ♥ is being used as a verb.

All in all, that license plate would be a bitch to decode. Though, I believe these alien radio images are a bit better designed.