Humans have always felt the strong longing to communicate. Humans have a natural need to express themselves and it has been present since the beginning of our existence. Through time we have come up with new ways to carry the message; pictures on wall caves, smoke signals, pigeons etc. Now we have made great advances and technology has helped us reach new levels of communication and discoveries in our world. These advances have led us to have a new yearning to communicate with Aliens. It is something quite extraordinary and ambitious of us to always try to take
discovers communicating ways with other beings. Everything lays the human curiosity, which has been the very strong aspect that has taken us throughout all the progress and evolution we have achieved throughout all these years. Human beings are trying to communicate with something, a thing, that we aren’t even sure exists but it is indeed a strong yearning to communicate with others we were born with and we have shown to go to great measures to try to make that happen.
Concept of Alien existence in the universe and to establish contact (physical or communicable) with them has always fascinated mankind. The topic has been an integral part of science fiction in movies all over the world. While the most publicized attempts at communicating with aliens involve using advanced technology, there are those who say that the only equipment we need is something we all possess—a brain. World mythologies in general and Indian mythology in particular have numerous descriptions of telepathically contact with Aliens. Meditation can make the person to enter a higher level of consciousness which, in addition to connecting him with aliens. But telepathy is not a science and varies from person to person according to his capacity of meditation and its approach. The telepathically achievements can very rarely be repeated and generalized for masses. Communicating with aliens is a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected.
Probability of Civilizations in the Universe
From the Atlas of the Universe we can see that our visible universe – which spans over 14 billion light years – contains an estimated 30 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars, or 30 billion trillion stars. Within that astronomical number of stars it seems mathematically inconceivable that there wouldn’t be many other civilizations somewhere. However, it is also obvious that we will never be able to communicate over such an enormous length of time, and any intelligent signals over such an immense space would diminish practically to zero before reaching us – for it would be swallowed up by millions of intervening galaxies. Our own galaxy – the Milky Way – contains 200 billion stars, but it is still too large for effective communications, because its size – 90 000 light years – would require 180 000 years for a two way communication. For practical reasons we have to confine our search for other civilizations to our immediate neighborhood. If we reduce our search to an area of 12,5 light years the number of stars shrinks dramatically to about 33 stars, out of which most are red dwarfs. That leaves about 6-7 normal stars. It would be highly unlikely to find intelligent life within such a small number. A 50 light years large neighborhood contains about 2000 stars, with 80% red dwarfs – still a relatively small number. The mathematical probability of finding alien life improves if we extend our search over 250 light years radius, within which we find an estimated 260 000 stars. Should we ever receive any intelligent signal it would most likely come from this small part of the Orion arm which constitutes part of the Milky Way. However, we have to keep in mind that at this distance communications would be mostly a one way street. Because if we receive a signal from 250 light years away it would require another 250 years to answer and a return answer would not come back before 500 years.
Alien-to-human communication
When one asks abductees what they mean by “telepathic communication,” they generally say that they receive an impression in their mind, which automatically converts it into words for comprehension. Reports from people of different nationalities indicate that the abductees convert telepathic communication into whatever language they speak. Thus, and this is important in understanding the global nature of the phenomenon, the aliens circumvent the problem of having to communicate in the vast variety of human languages. When in rare instances an abductee reports that the telepathic communication he or she is receiving contains an “accent,” one can surmise that this has more to do with the abductee’s expectations than with the reality of the situation. One of the great problems encountered by abduction researchers is the way in which abductees recount alien telepathic communication. Not only can it be very difficult for abductees to remember exactly what has been “said,” but remembrance is also complicated immeasurably by the problem of the abductee deciding exactly where the communication originated. Many abductees routinely mistake their own thoughts for thoughts put in their mind by the aliens. The question is how does one distinguish between “hearing” impressions from the aliens, or “hearing” one’s own thoughts? This problem, akin to “channeling,” has provided the rocks upon which many inexperienced abduction researchers have foundered. Mistaking human thought for alien communication, researchers have often developed poor and misleading data. Because of the human origination of this “communication,” channeled messages of societal concern and benevolence often make their way to the public and cause confusion among abductees and researchers alike.
Most of the time, abductees have no difficulty identifying and understanding alien communication although they often have problems describing that conversation accurately. Because of trouble converting the communication back to spoken or written language when remembering it, they generally add the phrases, “or something like that,” and, “or words to that effect,” to indicate that they cannot translate the telepathic dialogue with total exactness. Therefore, some imprecision, at least in recall, might be a somewhat constant feature of alien-to-human communication. Although the aliens are generally not too forthcoming about their goals and purposes, in some instances conversations take place with abductees in which the aliens are more substantive and center on those issues. These conversations are infrequent, but when they occur they can give important insight into the abduction program as a whole. However, the majority of the aliens’ conversations with abductees are either directive or palliative. They tell the abductee to remove his clothes, to get up on a table, to follow them, to get dressed, that it is time to go, and so forth. They tell the abductee they he will not be hurt, or that he will not be there very long, that everything is going to be all right, to calm down, and so forth.
Communicating electronically with Aliens
Some of the best minds in the world came up with integrated circuit boards which laid the groundwork for the Internet. Communication satellites, which is like taking the communication frontier into hyperspace. The invention of or the practical use of lasers, fiber optics, the microchip transistors, cordless technology, remote controls were all put forward. These inventions changed the lives of most people on the planet. Electronic communication has made it possible to bring things within the approach of common masses with its repeatability. Electronics communication networks on the earth have progressed tremendously within the last few decades and therefore, there seems a great hope that with the help of advanced electronics wireless communication networks either we will be able to decode the electronic massages from Aliens or we will be able to transmit and receive back the electronic signals to different corners of our universe in search of Aliens. Before scientists and engineers think of transmitting a message to possible intelligent extraterrestrials in the Cosmos a worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur. Self-explanatory languages have been tried with radio waves to extraterrestrials, but not sound waves or other signals on earth. They assume recipients patient enough to analyze repetitive mathematical signals to understand the content, and may assume note-taking ability such as opposable thumbs. By drawing on issues at the core of electronics wireless communication networks we can be much better prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come.
Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) is a branch of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that focuses on composing and deciphering messages that could theoretically be understood by another technological civilization. There are multiple independent organizations and individuals engaged in CETI research. CETI research has focused on four broad areas: mathematical languages, pictorial systems, algorithmic communication systems (ACETI) and computational approaches to detecting and deciphering “natural” language communication. There remain many undeciphered writing systems in human communication. Much of the research effort is directed at how to overcome similar problems of decipherment which arise in many scenarios of interplanetary communication.
Research also focuses on the event that we receive a signal/message that is either not directed at us (eavesdropping) or one that is in its natural communicative form. To tackle this difficult but probable scenario, methods are being developed that will first detect if a signal has intelligent-like structure, categorize the type of structure detected and then decipher its content: from its physical level encoding and patterns to the parts-of-speech, which encode internal and external ontologies. Primarily, this structure modeling focuses on the search for generic human and inter-species language universals to devise computational methods by which language can be discriminated from non-language and core structural syntactic elements of unknown languages can be detected. Aims of this research include: contributing to the understanding of language structure and the detection of intelligent language-like features in signals, to aid the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The problem goal is therefore to separate language from non-language without dialogue, and learn something about the structure of language in the passing. The language may not be human, the perceptual space can be unknown, and we cannot assume human language structure but must begin somewhere. We need to approach the language signal from a naive viewpoint, in effect, increasing our ignorance and assuming as little as possible. Scientists compare the complexity of cetacean and human languages to help determine if a specific signal from space is complex enough to represent a message that needs to be decoded.
SETI, which stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence, took over this function for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). SETI is a nonprofit organization that monitors the radio spectrum for signals from other star systems in the hopes that it will hear a radio signal from intelligent life on another planet. It uses a huge receiving station located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico (USA) to monitor millions of radio channels simultaneously, mostly by computers. Humans have come up with extraordinary ways to try and contact extraterrestrial force and technology has facilitated this for us. No concrete findings have surfaced yet, but with huge receivers as big as 790,000 sq ft. scientists are sure trying hard.
Further obstacles to find other civilizations
At a time when physicists are comfortable with multiple parallel universes, it may be that aliens have an entirely different way of reframing their relationship to space-time. NASA discusses whether it might be simpler than expected to communicate with aliens, should they ever make contact. Assuming aliens attempt to communicate via radio signal or some kind of electronic pulse, that means they would have a similar understanding of math and science. That would provide a common ground to crack their code. If such an alien civilization had broadcast its existence for all of 100 000 years, but starting two million years ago, the time span – or the thickness of the eggshell- would have radiated out from the originating planet at the speed of light. It would mean this electronic wave ( the eggshell ) would have hit our earth two million years ago but it would have lasted for only 100 000 years. So we would have missed it since at that time only primitive hominids roamed the African continent, barely having invented primitive stone tools. Similarly, our own electronic projection – starting less than one hundred years ago – would hit another planet millions of years after its civilization had expired, or alternatively, long before it evolved. In that case no communication would be possible because we would attempt to communicate with each other millions of years apart. The probability that an expanding eggshell from one civilization would intersect another civilization exactly at the right time when the receiving civilization would be able to detect such signals would certainly be ‘astronomically’ small, that is, almost non-existent. It has to be conceded that if the SETI should find any intelligent signal in the future the above theories would have to be revised. Should we detect any intelligent signals from outer space that certainly would be very exciting because it would expand our understanding of alien life forms enormously. However, the fact remains that communication would – for all practical reasons – still be a one way street because our answer would not receive a response from a potential alien world for several hundred years.
