What instruments are we using? Are we assuming that they see light on our visible spectrum? Why assume that? Do they see? Do they touch? Do they smell space? You guys are paid a lot. This is all you have?
For communication at range, you are left with slow-moving light and Radio. That’s it. Option three, which I would advocate, while I do think it is “woo” (I’d use that word at the meeting, with air quotes, btw) is Remote Viewing/Telepathy. Who knows.
In the meantime, we need to get a Saturn Mission ready and meet them there… And see if there are any new options up close. AND I recommend nukes on that ship.
Scientist guy ends meeting.
So, in practice, launching anything, manned or not, to the outer solar system is expensive, time consuming, and subject to all sorts of time constraints. It may be months before a launch window even opens. Realistically intercept is going to be Mars orbit, or closer. There’s a reason Rama does it at Inside Mercury orbit.
So it really is blast spectrum math (which is as universal a language as we have) and listen on every frequency we got.
Because if they entered the solar system at earth intercept course? They obviously know we are here, which means they can hear us. If, however, intercept came after solar system injection, but at outer system distance, then they can still detect us, but perhaps not as certain they can ‘hear’ us.
What we need to do is get a telescope capable of high definition space imagery to get a real good look. Is the James Webb launched? Use that. If not (like it happens today and not five years from now) use Hubble. I’d have to check aperture distance though. It may be too close.
Regardless we have satellites in orbit of getting a closer look. Commondeer every one to take every picture they can. Short exposure, long exposure, electromagnetic radiation, visible light, IR and UV light.
And get those SETI people on the line to turn Aricebo on direct line.
Yes, this is reasonable. Always have plan B.
Radio, Laser and Visuals. Time for that Mars intercept. And might as well take a flyer on Men Who Stare At Goats (why not?).
The real scientists are totally blown away by the fact that the damn thing is even here. How did it get this far? How is it still maneuvering?
Not our job. We need to figure out communication.
How do termites communicate with us? They don’t.
For the most true introduction to Humanity, we should wait until another nation sends astronauts to make contact, and then suddenly and mercilessly kill them in clear view of the aliens.
We missed our first chance.
If they come back, we hide until they leave. We keep hiding until we really level up the propulsion and UFO-interceptin’ tech tree… then it’s our turn to start asking questions.
Is Turmp present in this scenario or not?
[edit]
Is he leading the first contact team?
Wait, so the aliens are turnips?
I haven’t read the other answers, but we utilize every spectrum of the electromagnetic scale that could reach that far. Multiple Radio frequencies are a no-brainer, but I’m not sure if we have other methods with the power and focus to hit the kind of distance ie. I’m not sure I’ve heard of us beaming microwave communication from Earth. The further you go up the scale the power factor increases, but the great thing about physics is it is a universal language and transcends all language barriers. Other than that I’m not sure. If we tried to send a probe, the aliens would have to catch it themselves which if they’re using planetary breaking, they may not have the ship power to do. So you could insert it into orbit around Jupiter or Mars and maybe on their flyby they could view a message with some high powered telescopy.
Otherwise I’d have a big ass sign that points to Europe, Canada or Australia and say “land there”, because at this point too many Americans would just try and kill them (wish I were kidding).
This is a hard problem. But they are more advanced than us. Maybe as spacefarers, they have been in similar situations.
So let them find a solution.
Send a probe to the alien ship. Inside is a transmitter that can send signals to earth. The transmitter is attached to a modern computer. Maybe it’s loaded with some programming tools and a cached copy of Wikipedia. The probe has an antenna that occasionally receives and plays a YouTube video from Earth.
This makes it clear that humans want to make contact, they primarily communicate via audiovisual means, and their signal technology is based on electronics that transmit or receive radio waves.
Then we wait for them to reverse engineer the probe and contact us. If they want to.
Do whatever Carl Sagan advised. He gave it a lot of thought.
I miss him.
Is that not how we communicate with probes?
Looks like the uplink to Juno, for instance, is in the single digit gigahertz range.
You’d have to just try things. Assumption: these are either biological life–that is broadly similar to life on Earth: cellular, lipid membranes, internal metabolism, some sort of protein coding and inheritance apparatus probably involving long polymers–or they’re machine intelligences built by biological life.
Regardless, I’m not sure that broadcasting on radio frequencies would be the way to go. It’s not obvious to me that our basic modulation schemes–where we encode variations in air pressure as oscillations in the amplitude or frequency of a specific carrier band–would be intelligible. Certainly our digital schemes (basically anything besides FM/AM radio) would be completely impenetrable because of multiple layers of encoding: messages are converted to some digital scheme (ASCII, jpeg, mp3, whatever), then they’re compressed to preserve bandwidth, error checking and correction is added, the digital signals are encoded into a multi-level dual-orthogonal modulation scheme which is mediated by a proprietary messaging protocol and which varies in real time based on channel characteristics and traffic. Then they’re stuffed into a channel space that is crowded with other signals. Many of our radio transmissions (e.g. GPS) are wideband and thus statistically indistinguishable from noise and are thus mathematically undetectable. Or maybe the aliens use gravitons for communication and never considered photons for that purpose at all.
I think that any life would rely on EM radiation to drive energy gradients, and probably couldn’t exist in a vacuum, so would be embedded in some sort of fluid medium that conducts pressure waves, i.e. sound. I’d try to use audio and tactile cues, which is what we use for communicating with animals. But that requires being right there. Visual cues are tricky–they rely on having evolved with a particular ambient solar radiation spectrum. A sphere suggests an understanding of geometry, so mathematical sequences may have merit there, but how to communicate these sequences to the aliens? Given no other cues from the alien vessel, I’d go up there and tap them onto the hull.
Cool! The main microwave stuff I’m familiar with is the cool/crazy idea of transmitting solar power from orbit or the moon via microwave radiation to Earth as a high-yield energy source.