How will we communicate with a truly alien civilization?

Examples:

The aliens are the ship.

The aliens are robotic. They don’t see colors. They use radar. They know color as a small fragment of the EM spectrum as wavelength. How do you explain color to them? Blue is 490 to 450 nm. How do you explain nanometers?

They have various mandibles that are used as hands.

They have no concept of time.

They are a hive mind. You enter the ship and are surrounded by tiny flying things. You destroy them. You have just destroyed part of a brain. It is powerful and very angry now.

The ship is incredibly powerful. The occupants are confused. Why are they awake? Where are they now? And why?

Isn’t that why SETI concentrates on frequencies that have distinct or meaningful anomalies in radio astronomy, such as the hydrogen band, or the one for water?

I think indeed starting of with a very simple alternating beep boop beep boop. Nature does hardly ever beep boop beep regularly, except for huge-ass pulsars.

From the beeps and boops I think it’d be best to be taking it slowly up in complexity. Some maths, some basic encoding (a rasterized image for example) If at all possible work in some logic in there, P V -P stuff like that.

At least four of your scenario’s can only be sensibly dealt with with a very careful, nay passive approach. Beam some basic, low density maths and logic at them and wait.

Just sit and wait and prepare the nukes and fallout shelters just in case.

Hard to imagine any alien species flying all the way to Earth to destroy us. If they have the technology to fly interstellar distances they certainly could shoot a relativistic ballistic at us if they wanted.

So, we can assume some things are more likely than others:

  1. They’re probably not here to kill us. They could have done it from across the galaxy if they wanted.
  2. This is, more than likely, not a “crewed” ship. The time it takes to cross distances like that make organic-life travel very difficult. So this is probably a robotic probe of some sort.
  3. They already know we’re here. Of all the planets in all the galaxies, them picking this one and an orbital trajectory for Earth means they know we’re here. Going out to meet them seems like a waste. They’re coming to us.
  4. It’s possible that we’re the first alien life they’ve come across, but that seems unlikely, so they probably already have some sort of protocol and procedure for engaging with new species.

So my suggestion would be to chill out and wait. Anything we do could accidentally be misconstrued. There’s no win in being proactive. Wait for them to try to communicate with us. They are obviously a far more advanced culture than us, and they know that too. Hard to imagine they’d travel all that way and then expect us to figure out how to talk to them.

So yeah, basically Close Encounters.

OTOH…

(note that while i use this as an example of the problematic Paradox community, and don’t subscribe to its newsletter, it’s pretty funny in a horrible way.)

LOL. That reminds me of funny easter egg in an old (and not interesting) game

Wait, they don’t mean that as a joke?

With Paradox games, on their forums, there is definitely a certain subset for whom it is decidedly not.

I mean I remember nopeing out when I came across one particularly vile example where someone was insulting anyone who played a Muslim country in EU IV (specifically the Ottomans), and was freaking the fuck out about how none of the orthodox nations* were playable and how the Serbs should really be so much more powerful and able to repel the Turks.

Sadly people like that are… not rare.

*for some reason Russia didn’t count for him? I didn’t get it either.

Ha ha I would imagine our radio waves aren’t going “very far” into space…if anything, like trying to whisper to a dog in Death Valley while on the top of Mount Everest.

Au contraire mon frère. The output of EMF from Earth is that of a small star. And it travels through space at essentially the speed of light. While the signal might degrade, the sphere of energy is there and measurable.

And this is the crux of my question. How do they translate it? What if their language, their method of communication is so very alien that their is no Rosetta Stone? How then to communicate?

Then we can’t do anything but beam our means of communication in progressing order of complexity ( 1 0 11 00 etc.) at them and hope their superior intelligence (i mean they are the ones fucking with the laws of physics beyond our comprehension doing interstellar travel) will be up to the task.

Gracious. I believe my omitted analogy holds true, more so now than ever…but it has been proven to be absolutely lackluster. It is like man on the moon whispering to an ant in a different galaxy far far away. (cliche?)