A Message to the Stars

2021 RELEASE  |  AIRING ON: NHK, WELT, HRT

As of today, we are still sending messages to the stars: messages that, so far, have not been answered.

For more than 50 years, we’ve been unsuccessfully searching for any evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. But, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets has meant the hope of finding them is higher than ever.

First contact with alien intelligence will become a reality in the future, so we must understand how to communicate. While SETI searches for extra-terrestrial life, METI are the body communicating with the stars in the hope of receiving an answer.

But, it’s hard to imagine what form anybody listening in Space will take, and what their intelligence could be like, so it’s difficult to compose a message. What kind of universal language could we use? What should the content of the message be? How could we introduce ourselves to an unknown civilization? Could it be risky to send messages into the unknown, in case the recipients were hostile?

Above all, the biggest difficulty is to create a common language that could be understood by any form of intelligent life. There’s almost a general consensus that language should be based on mathematics, and it was a mathematician, the Dutch Dr. Hans Freudhental, who created a cosmic language called Lincos. Up to date, this is the only language that has been created with such a purpose. But, other techniques have been attempted including messages in many languages spoken here on Earth, samples of art and drawings, and music, in the hope that it might also act as a language to the unknown.

Despite the difficulty, several messages have been already sent. The first one was designed by Carl Sagan in 1972, and sent on the plaques of the Pioneer 10 and 11. Next, there were golden discs onboard the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977 holding several radio messages, the Arecibo message of 1974 being the most famous one, which held a variety of communication attempts.

However, assuming that the closest star system, Proxima Centauri is four light years away, if we send a radio message towards it, it would take at least four more years to get a response, so the dialogue with any alien civilisation there would be complicated and slow. If we think of a star that was a distance of hundreds or thousands of light years away… well, the communication becomes almost impossible.

If any messages could eventually be decoded and answered in any far, far away star, it could radically transform our consciousness as species and our place in the universe. A message from the stars would change life on Earth… forever. This ground-breaking new documentary explores the research and work undertaken so far, and looks at the various ways attempts to communicate have been approached from a scientific perspective as we continue to ask, can anybody hear us?