Anthropology and communicating with extraterrestrials

The New Yorker has an interview of Douglas Vakoch , author of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication , a new book about the complexities of communicating with extraterrestrials, released last month by NASA.

From the New Yorker article: "For a long time, the people most interested in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence came from "hard science" disciplines like astronomy or physics; to them, the main obstacles seemed technical (building radio telescopes, processing signal data). But, in recent years, the field has broadened to include people who already study other civilizations here on Earth. In these essays, they report that their jobs are hard enough as it is. Archaeologists struggled to decipher ancient Greek; deciphering a transmission from another world will be even more difficult. Even if we do manage to detect a signal, they write, fully understanding what it means may be impossible."

You can submit your own recommendation for outbound communications to ET on the Earth Speaks website, and browse what others have submitted.