Basing his ideas on Darwinian evolution, scientist Albert Harrison believes some aliens that visit us might be more of the ID4/SIGNS we-come-for-your-stuff variety instead of the E.T./STARMAN we-just-want-to-know-you flavor. Harrison also believes that the radio signals we’ve been unintentionally blasting into space is not the best example of humanity that aliens should be receiving. We can’t argue with him on that point.

He has no thoughts on why the conquering-aliens movies we’ve mentioned suck more than the friendly alien comparisons we’ve provided.

Some enthusiasts believe any alien civilisation capable of reaching us can only have survived long enough to develop the necessary technology by solving major social problems, such as war, poverty and discrimination. Harrison disagrees.

“I do think there’s a risk in active searches for extra-terrestrials. The attitude seems to be they’re friendly, they’re a long way away, and they can’t get here. But if you wake up one morning and an armada of extra-terrestrial spaceships are circling Earth, that prediction won’t necessarily hold,” Harrison said.

If life has evolved elsewhere in our cosmic neighbourhood, we should find out by detecting their waste gases in the atmosphere of their planet or by discovering remnants of extra-terrestrial microbes in meteorites or alien soil samples, he said.

[…]

His research suggests not, but he believes Christians should clarify whether God’s creation covers the whole of space or just Earth.

That’s right. He gave you notes on the Bible. That Happened. And it’s not a bad idea.

Exolanguage: do you speak alien?

In related news, are you ready to speak with the coming alien overlords?

So where might we find some common ground with ET? Perhaps in mathematics. This idea goes back about three centuries, when it was suggested that we could hail beings on the moon by cutting a diagram of Pythagoras’s theorem into the forests of Siberia.

In 1960, Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal proposed an interspecies language called Lincos that starts with simple mathematical statements – a series of beeps to represent 1 + 1 = 2 for example. It then uses these to define logical relationships, eventually building up to more complex concepts of time and space.

But how do you convey human ideas like, ‘Please don’t eat us?‘ or ‘You can have that lovely island of Australia if you leave the rest of us be?’

It seems mixing images with math may save us.

And we can do better than “cows go moo”. Paolo Musso, a philosopher at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome, Italy, has outlined one way to combine mathematics and images to tell a moral tale using the process of analogy. First, arithmetic is used to establish signals that mean right and wrong, defined by sums that are right and wrong. These can then be applied to cartoons showing what we consider to be good and bad actions.

Comics will save us…

“My conclusion is that you would just send them the Google servers. That’s an enormous amount of information, much of it redundant and pictographic. Much of it is pornographic too, but I expect they could handle that.”

… or porn.