Most of my readers know me as someone who writes about deafness, cochlear implants,neuroscience, and neurotechnology. So you might wonder, what am I up to in writing about astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? Let me explain…Read on.

Why not send the code of an AI to extraterrestrials? Now that would be a real visitor, able to converse with its hosts and share details of Earthly life and thought, and return with its new knowledge. For it the trip would be instantaneous both ways. Decades or centuries would pass on Earth, of course, but it’d still be faster than physical spacecraft and more satisfying than just exchanging greeting cards. Read more.

In this blog entry I discuss a message transmitted from the Evapatoria Deep Space Antenna in Evapatoria, Ukraine to four target stars between May and July 1999. It’s called the Cosmic Call. Can we assume that this message will be understood by any intelligent alien mind? What hidden assumptions of ours might not be shared? Read on.