Message in a Bottle

Mary Pedicini, Dominic Sivitilli, Maria Pykälä

We are interested in identifying and discussing the moral and practical questions surrounding the possibility of leaving human knowledge for future or alien intelligences. These questions range from examining the motivations for attempting to convey our knowledge, to the kinds of engineering challenges we might face in preserving knowledge in a form or location that could potentially outlast human civilization. Long term, we invite expertise and perspectives from various disciplines to help identify and answer these questions, and ultimately create a plan for sharing this knowledge.

The project will take the form of a review paper and a game, each of which will inform the other. The paper will address some of the aforementioned questions, with a particular focus on unpicking who gets to contribute to such a message. The game will provide an accessible and captivating entry point into the conversation, for children/young adults or lay people not versed in the field. As an act of both science communication and information collection, the game will allow people to explore the challenges and possibilities involved in drafting a message to a non-human audience, and reflect their responses.