From Pictorial to Computational: The Evolution of Humanity’s Messages to Extraterrestrial Intelligence

To the point

From Frank Drake's 1960 Project Ozma and its prototype 551-bit message, including Barney Oliver's lone semiprime reply that yielded a martini-glass image, through the 1974 Arecibo Message and on to Hans Freudenthal's Lingua Cosmica (Lincos), Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas's Cosmic Call transmissions, and Alexander Ollongren's Lincos 2.0 based on lambda calculus, the search for greeting extraterrestrials moved from pictures to symbols to computation in a bid for clearer, machine-readable communication, even as the best approach remains uncertain and aimed at understanding both human cognition and possible alien minds.