Efforts to contact extraterrestrial intelligence inevitably call for concise answers to fundamental philosophical questions about who we are and what we know. Human activities on our own planet have precipitated global environmental changes and the extinctions of numerous species. What's more, almost every part of the human race has exterminated some other part of the human race since before recorded history. Messages transmitted to other stars have nevertheless tended to imply that Homo sapiens is a friendly, peace-loving species with rational, scientific attitudes.
While such messages include purported "universal" mathematics, graphics and audio frequency content suitable for the human sensorium, any extraterrestrial sentience will have evolved in a perceptual, social and philosophical reality that would be wildly unlikely to be compatible with our own. The least ambiguous parts of our most serious messages for extraterrestrials are the messages they contain for human beings themselves.
Each year, Moogfest invites next-level thinkers and futurist philosphers to imagine the future of creativity. For his keynote at Moogfest, Joe Davis will trace the history of several projects centered on ideas about extraterrestrial communications that have given rise to new scientific techniques and inspired new forms of artistic practice. Huge numbers of biological agents with robust archives can now be transmitted across vast astronomical distances and over periods spanning millions of years, but an even newer form of interstellar transmission falls just within the realm of possibility. Davis will explain how an interstellar message can be created that is intended explicitly for human beings rather than for aliens: a "swansong" with precise reports about the human condition that might be used to break the wheel of time.
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moogfest.com
