Translating an alien language

John Elliott

What work do you do for SETI? My contributions in the academic side are in being able to understand the structures in the signal if we receive one. There’s been at least one occasion where I’ve looked at a signal, just to see if there’s any structure in there. So if they pick something up, I’ll be looking at the content to see if there’s anything in there that denotes intelligence, any sort of linguistic phenomena or imagery or anything with structure that’s actually conveying information. How confident are you that you could decipher the message? It obviously all depends on the amount of content you’ve got. If it was just a short burst, like the Wow! signal, then you’re up against it. But if it was someone on the…

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