Establishing an extraterrestrial communication protocol would improve the likelihood of messages being understood by alien lifeforms, say postgraduate astrophysicists Dimitra Atri, Julia DeMarines and Jacob Haqq-Misra. They state in their Space Policy paper, “By carefully constructing a framework by which to write and send messages, we will optimize the quality of messages as they are broadcast and increase the probability that we are understood.”
The authors suggest that such a protocol should include “constraints and guidelines for signal encoding, message length, [and] information content.” Additionally, they say a transmission strategy should be clearly laid out in this protocol, and they suggest “a simple physical or mathematical language with the signal repeated regularly to avoid being overlooked as noise.”
