pable of receiving our radio signals must have some knowledge of physics to build radio receivers.

While interstellar geek-speak might be fine for sending details of your solar system and the latest technology, it's not so easy to move on to more abstract ideas, such as human nature and culture. How would you convey a simple sentiment like "we come in peace"?
How do you convey a simple sentiment like 'we come in peace' to an alien species?

"It seems that sooner or later one must fall back on pictures," says DeVito. Images might be the only way to convey to an alien what we're talking about, and to show them what our world is like. They wouldn't need to have vision like ours, merely some way to understand spatial patterns in at least two dimensions. Then they could attach symbols to meanings, like a child with a picture book.

And we can do better than "cows go moo". Paolo Musso, a philosopher at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome, Italy, has outlined one way to combine mathematics and images to tell a moral tale using the process of analogy. First, arithmetic is used to establish signals that mean right and wrong, defined by sums that are right and wrong. These can then be applied to cartoons showing what we consider to be good and bad actions.

Many of these approaches start with counting, but what if the slimy ones don't have our concept of arithmetic? "There is no guarantee that if ETs have mathematics it will be commensurable with ours," says Vakoch. He and others have instead suggested a more creative channel of communication: sending examples of our culture. It is possible, Vakoch says, that aliens will develop a taste for Toulouse-Lautrec paintings or Meade Lux Lewis boogie-woogie numbers, and then we will have done something worthwhile. In 2008 NASA transmitted a song by The Beatles at the star Polaris, while artist Joe Davis has aimed other sounds and messages at two nearby stars.

Zaitsev's longer messages - Cosmic Call 1 and 2, and Teen Age Message - combine several of these ideas. Each message consists of a beam of radio waves sent from the Evpatoria radio telescope in southern Ukraine, which encoded each bit of information by shifting the transmission frequency slightly up or down. A bit can represent a black or white square, and a number of them can be built up pixel by pixel into a series of pictures like the original Arecibo message. Some of them form a rather sketchy "bilingual image glossary" - a dozen hand drawings meant to show concepts including people, family, nature and games, with English and Russian words attached. Zaitsev has also included an excerpt of theremin music to soothe, or perhaps irritate, alien listeners.

Give them porn

But the main content was a series of 127-by-127 pixel images forming the "interstellar Rosetta

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