Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence

This paper addresses the knowledge gap on the beginning of the history of contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings in international astronautics. In the mid-1950s, the world's space law practitioner, Andrew G. Haley, proposed the concept of Metalaw, the law governing interactions between all beings in the Universe, as he represented the American Rocket Society in the International Astronautical Congress, the single largest gathering of space-faring nations. Haley, with experience in radio communications law dating back to the 1930s, played a pivotal role in pushing for the international allocation of radio frequencies in space. Haley was, too, an agile mediator with the Soviet Union and its bloc, acting across various organizations and forums. This article, in contextualizing Haley's introduction of Metalaw, shows how the onset of the Space Age coincided with the emergence of a contact scenario involving extraterrestrial intelligence enabled by the corresponding techno-scientific capabilities of the time. It demonstrates how extraterrestrial intelligence discursively addressed outer space regulation as a bone of contention between the two geopolitically divided parts, a regulation upon which the US's global satellite system would depend. The analysis in this article recounts the birth of the Metalaw concept at the intersection of outer space imaginary, law, international organizations, science and technology, diplomacy, the Space Race, the Cold War, and radio astronomy's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

For decades, and even now, our expectation of alien contact has only existed in terms of direct physical contact. It does not take into account, however, an obvious phenomenon of the Universethe enormous distances between cosmological objects. We propose the model, which is based on an interaction between civilizations of different planets, where information exchange and direct contact are significantly separated in time. Any civilization, including earth's, will be granted a safe Extraterrestrial Contact Window, the size of which depends on the distance between civilizations and the achieved speed of spaceships. An important conclusion is that good morality in inter civilizational interaction has a greater chance of prevailing than the so-called evil civilization, the spread of which is impeded by a barrier of the size of a sphere of several thousand light years. Furthermore, this paper places great importance on finding a technology based on quantum entanglement, as this could potentially give us the ability to exchange information instantaneously, i.e., with infinite speed.

This document outlines a potential formalized doctrine derived from the core concepts of the Dark Forest Theory, as presented in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, and the idea of an unspoken strategic code among intelligent life. It presents a framework based on pessimistic assumptions, prioritizing absolute survival in a potentially hostile cosmos by establishing foundational axioms, core principles, and operational rules centered on concealment and preemptive security.

For interstellar messages that we have sent so far, the underlying assumption in schemes for encoding/ decoding is that the recipients are fundamentally similar to ourselves. But there have been criticisms of this assumption of equivalence approach because intelligence even on our own planet takes many different forms, and these forms are influenced by the senses of the individual. Jonas and Jonas (1976) describe hypothetical extraterrestrial species with alternate senses inspired by Earth animals. This current work further expands on the capability of these extraterrestrial species to understand messages that we would send. A continuum of similarity to humans is proposed, from species whose senses do not allow them to develop radio technology, to species who do but whose senses do not allow them to understand 2D images, to species with senses only slightly different than our own. Implications for message construction are considered, and recommendations for future message content are given. These recommendations include redundant sections with questions that require different senses (similar to how a person can see a number in a colorblind test only if they are not colorblind). Replies would tell us the sensory modalities we should be addressing with this particular extraterrestrial intelligence. Another recommendation would be to use information about a targeted planet to determine the most probable sense of inhabitants, and tailor messages to that sense.

In 2017 two Universities of Lima (Peru), the Universidad Católica Sedes Sapientiae (UCSS) and the Universidad Femenina del Sagrado Corazón (UNIFÉ), presented a project called La Vida en el Universo: Su Origen, Su Naturaleza, Su Sentido (Life in the Universe: Its Origin, Its Nature, Its Meaning), which was awarded one of the six Oxford Templeton Visiting Fellowships to Latin America offered by Oxford University and the John Templeton Foundation. The core of the project was a one-week field research about the experience of intercultural dialogue, which is being developed in the last twelve years in the UCSS Amazonian branch of Atalaya (called UCSS-Nopoki), one of the few cases in the world (maybe uniquely fully successful) of a positive interaction between cultures with very different technological levels, as, on one side, our Western civilizations and, on the other side, the Amazonian original peoples having their sons studying in Nopoki. In the present paper some significant results of this research will be presented, which question the widespread skepticism about the possibility of intercultural communication, generally based on the currently dominant philosophical relativism. Furthermore, with respect to a future contact with a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization, this experience of interaction with the "otherness"-seen from both contexts, both from the Western and the Amazonian side-can serve as a model for possible communication. In the same way, this experience of intercultural relationship should demonstrate that the interaction between different civilizations, if managed properly, can have a positive impact on each of them, also helping everyone to understand better our place in the context of both our particular history and the "Big History" of the Universe.

In light of the controversy over whether we should defend Earth from hostile alien aggression, this METI blog post identifies twelve more urgent ethical issues in space exploration: (1) planetary protection; (2) intrinsic value of off-Earth life forms; (3) invoking the Precautionary Principle; (4) cleaning up orbiting space debris; (5) satellite surveillance; (6) weaponization of space;  (7) scientific vs. commercial space activities; (8) terraforming Mars; (9) colonizing Mars; (10) protecting Earth from alien threats; (11) single Earth community of moral deliberation; and (12) a common good for the Milky Way Galaxy.