Unfortunately, I don’t think we have to worry about what we will put in an interstellar message. I think the much larger concern is what we have already put in these messages. Ever since we have started broadcasting radio and even more so television, many types of radio waves will bounce off various layers of the atmosphere, we have been showing any extra-terrestrial life form what we are all about.
We can break it down into two different kind of signals sent. I narrow it to just two because the messages that the scientific community are sending are truly the “drop in the bucket”. Especially after the 1940’s any television broadcast that we have watched on TV have continued on there journey into space. Now if this doesn’t strike you as a problem, just think of the evening news that you watched last night. The first contact that an alien life form would have with the human race would include all of those glorious events that news editors know will get them their ratings.
I for one, would not want the first impression of my race to be based on Hitler and mass murder. What about the fact that we created a weapon that was so powerful that we can vaporize an entire city almost instantaneously. We murder, rape, torture and kidnap. If that fact weren’t bad enough we keep a visual record of it to show others. This same record is rocketing through space as the beam of energy that it is. As time went on, the wars continued, and the media coverage got better. We are now up to the point that we can see a soldier get blown up in real time right in our living room. Same as before, so can they.
If just the conflicts aren’t bad enough, we have humans that eat each other. They stalk and torture their own species, not to mention what we have done to our home planet.
The real beauty of this situation is in the fact that the horrors that happened before TV, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and such, Hollywood has remade over and over again. Of course the original events may not have been violent enough so we take an artistic license with them so they sell tickets. I don’t think there is any question to alien life forms the welcome they would receive thanks to our so called summer blockbusters.
It may not all be bad. You still have the occasional firefighter running back into a burning building to save a baby. There are countless stories of people helping other people in need. I am just afraid that in this case, our innate lust for violence and gore, not to mention our unbelievably efficient methods of killing each other, will out weigh the good in the interstellar court.
All I can say is good luck to the human race. I hope they get the scientific version first and believe that “we come in peace”.
