The synth from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Image: Wikimedia
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If by some stroke of luck, extraterrestrials do recognize sound, we are still left with the problem of aesthetics and meaning. Would our human music, with its impossibly wide range of tonal variations, be pleasing to the alien ear? Would it contain any useful information? Just as dolphin clicks are inscrutable to us, might a Bach concerto reverberate as an offensive screech to the aesthetic palate of another, far more foreign, intelligence?That said, if aliens are interested in us, they have plenty of source material. We’ve been weeping radio waves into space since the dawn of the modern age, and this garble could tell an intelligent race far more than we realize, just as a perusal of one’s own unedited search history often reveals a very clear form of one’s personhood, fears, and desires—to say nothing of the limits of one’s intelligence. The result isn’t necessarily flattering. In Carl Sagan’s 1985 science-fiction novel Contact, aliens from the Vega star system make contact by bouncing back to Earth the first television signal strong enough to escape our planet’s ionosphere: Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics.Even an intentional message, like the Golden Record, might travel though the universe for millennia. We may not be around by the time it reaches the intended audience. And on the rare chance that we haven’t destroyed our planet and ourselves along with it, we will definitely have made evolutionary leaps in the composition of music. Consider, after all, the difference between Incan pan flutes and Einstürzende Neubauten; that’s only a thousand years of relatively eventless human history.
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