Showing Off to the Universe: Stephen Wolfram on Talking to Alien Minds

Suppose we wanted to send a message that could be understood by an alien intelligence, or by whoever finds it ten thousand years from now. What would we say? How would we say it? And how would anyone on the receiving end even tell that it came from a mind and not from nature?

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language, and the author of A New Kind of Science. He has thought long and hard about these questions. In his essay "Showing Off to the Universe: Beacons for the Afterlife of Our Civilization," he asks what it would take to build a lasting beacon of human civilization. He also suggests that, from a computational point of view, the line between "intelligent" and "natural" may be much blurrier than we assume.

Long Now Boston co-founder Grant Stephen will join Stephen for a fireside conversation about alien minds, beacons to other worlds, and what it would take to communicate across vast distances of space and time. The same puzzle drives many Long Now projects: warnings meant to outlast nuclear waste, archives of human languages, and a Clock built to tick for 10,000 years. Each is a message to recipients we can barely imagine. A conversation and audience Q&A will follow.

Doors open at 6:15 PM; the conversation starts at 6:30, followed by social time with snacks. Seating is limited; if registration fills, please join the waitlist.

Image: the Voyager Golden Record cover, launched aboard Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977 (NASA).