Douglas Vakoch reports that when the esteemed German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss contemplated communication with extraterrestrials at the beginning of the 19th century, targeting the moon seemed obvious. Our planet’s natural satellite provided the nearest plausible home for life beyond Earth.
The form and content of the message we could send was equally clear to Gauss. He is credited with the idea of communicating with inhabitants of the moon by clearing large swaths of the Siberian forest of its trees and in their place planting massive wheat fields in the shape of carefully arranged geometrical shapes, which would be visible from the moon. Specifically, he wanted to show Lunarians that Earthlings are familiar with the Pythagorean theorem by creating massive landscapes demonstrating that the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse: a2 + b2 = c2.
Nearly two centuries after Gauss’s proposal, our team has turned to him for inspiration, using math as a universal language for interstellar communication by radio. We of course now know that our moon is inhospitable to life. But in the last two decades we have learned of the existence of planets around other stars. Some of these exoplanets orbit within their star’s “Goldilocks zone,” where it is not too hot, and not too cold, but just right to allow for the existence of liquid water—a prerequisite for life as we know it. Recently we sent a series of radio messages that included a numerical description of the Pythagorean theorem to one such exoplanet, in the hope of eliciting a response from any geometry-savvy inhabitants.
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