Since the beginning of our endeavors in the final frontier, one of the central themes has been the expectation and hope of extraterrestrial life. It has been the theme for an incalculable quantity of science fiction, and one of the paramount symbols used when justifying our efforts to explore the universe. In that effect, many hours have been spent by many of the smartest minds trying to come up with messages, conceivably intercepted, interpreted, and responded to by extraterrestrial creatures.
These are wonderful symbols. They provide humanity with the opportunity to define some of its fundamental cosmic characteristics, a tremendous thought experiment. It also gives us a place to reflect on how well we know the fundamental properties of the universe. After all, trying to make maps to Earth as readable as possible, without access to any units of time or space that we use on Earth, is fun.
However, this is fundamentally an introspective exercise, and not a practical one. There is no way any written language or series of symbols could be interpreted by a non-earth-based life form. This is proven by our own history of communication and translation.
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most important pieces of archaeology ever found, because it provided a direct translation to ancient Egyptian script, which we had not yet translated when it was found. This was a language directly related to living, spoken languages, that provided many pieces of writing that we were actively trying to decipher. Much of the writing also talked about history that we were familiar with. Nonetheless, it took a direct translation of a large passage to a spoken language in order to understand almost any of the script.
This is important because Ancient Egyptian would be significantly easier the decipher for human beings than any human communication could possibly be for extraterrestrial life. Firstly, both Ancient Egyptian and modern languages both exist in a tradition of written language, meaning that we immediately understood that the symbols on the stones were an attempt to communicate, which was not true for all humans. For example, it was not until very recent that we understood that language had been recorded in the Inca Empire, just not through writing, but through colored knots.
Secondly, our species is unique in its development and value of communication as a concept. Trying to communicate with a whale is impossible, and they are mammals with language. Trying to communicate with a tree doesn’t even make any sense. Much less, trying to use written symbols to communicate with a tree is so obviously fruitless that no one would ever try. There is no reason why extraterrestrial life would communicate amongst itself in a way any more similar to us than a tree.
Ultimately, things like the Golden Record are a beautiful capstone to an endeavor that has other scientific purposes, but I have no expectation that any message human beings could possibly send could ever be understood by anyone but the sender.
