What language will be the best to speak to aliens with?

It has to happen one day. The sun is only one of 500 billions stars in our galactic. And it’s likely to be more galactics than there has been Chinese people in the world since the first couple from their nationality. So that’s why I think that maybe not me, maybe not my son, but some people in a future will meet the aliens.

It would be better if they are on the same civilisation level as we are. Then we would be able to play chess with them and pick up some pretty alien girls. Otherwise we would have to fight with them for like five years old lassie (we) with the best-form Mike Tyson (they).

But the most important question is about how we will talk with them. What will happen when someone from space receives our signals and send their own?

Nearly 40 years ago, radio astronomer Jerry Ehman detected a signal from an alien civilisation. He picked something up. It was very short, a distinct spike – a sort of momentary broadcast. On a print-out, he circled the blip in red pen and wrote one word: “Wow!”. The “Wow! signal”, as it became known, has never been explained, or heard again.

Now The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) continue to look for the aliens in the space. What would happen if they hear any signal?

“There’s still divided opinion on what to do – the two main camps being yes, you do respond and the other being no you don’t” – said Dr John Elliott from Leeds Beckett University in the UK.

If we will decide to answer, these would be the two biggest problems. First, how to answer ? Scientist from SETI are now collecting all the signals received from the space. There is a lot of them but all “interesting” ones have so far turned out to either be inexplicable, like the Wow! signal, or simply caused by natural phenomena like supernovae.

The second problem is about distance. The nearest star system with a planet is 10.5 light years away. That’s 21 Earth years to send a message and get a reply. It is also about 12142126789 times more kilometres than from Moscow to New York (my calculations on the paper). We have to hope that with the longer distance we will more get along than Russians and Americans.