As SETI scientists plan for their first contact with other worlds, who better to consult with than anthropologists, who specialize in encounters with exotic cultures? And thus, over the past several years the SETI Institute has repeatedly brought together anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines, in an attempt to bridge the gap between humans and extraterrestrials. The task of these savants, who met most recently in San Jose, California, is twofold: to try to uncover any universals of culture, and then apply these insights to constructing messages that might be intelligible to independently evolved civilizations. “Although it is impossible to predict the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence,” admitted NASA’s Chief Historian, Steven Dick, “the one certainty is that, if it exists, it will have undergone cultural evolution.”

For SETI researchers, the dizzying variety of societies that might evolve on other worlds becomes manageable for one simple reason: if extraterrestrials can build a radio transmitter or high powered laser beacon, we and they already have something vital in common. Indeed, there may be dolphin-like forms of intelligence in the oceans of other planets, but unless they can erect transmitters to send signals across interstellar space, we may never know of their existence. And to build the technology that makes such contact possible, it has often been argued, extraterrestrials would certainly need to know some of the same mathematics that we do. Extraterrestrials might not understand English or Chinese or Swahili, but they’d certainly be familiar with algebra and geometry.Or would they?

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