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Assumptions: After Contact Ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn their eyes to the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one... two... three... Contact optimists have tended to assume that alien messages would be relatively easy to understand. The communication of quite complicated information is not very difficult, claimed Sagan, even for civilizations with very different biologies and social conventions. Once pictures are transmit- ted, it will be extremely simple to develop language—by show and tell.* “We are considering not cryptography,” Sagan declared, “but anticryp- tography, the design by a very intelligent civilization of a message so simple that even civilizations as primitive as ours can understand it.” Jill Tarter thought that an information-bearing message would be crafted for unam- biguous transmission, because contact with us will not be the first encoun- ter of a superior technology with an emergent one.* If they are far ahead of us technologically, McDonough optimistically assumed, then they will be just as advanced in their ability to teach. They may have had thousands of experiences in teaching their language and culture to other primitive civilizations, and they would know how to do it very well—if they so wanted. However, teaching would be far more difficult if we receive messages from great distances, cautioned Baird; it would be without the customary aid of immediate feedback from the teacher.° There are good technical reasons to separate the functions of establish- ing contact (the beacon) and conveying information (the communi- cation channel). Morrison thought that the first transmission would be an 279 The Message Will Be Comprehensible —Nikola Tesla, in a prediction written in 1900! Once we have the message... the rest is easy. —Frank Drake, 1974?