Could We Understand an Alien Message?

The Sunday May 31, 2026 open public meeting of the Chicago Society for Space Studies (CSSS) will feature CSSS Speakers Bureau member Dale Dellutri and his presentation Could We Understand an Alien Message.

Assuming for the moment that we do receive a radio message that is clearly a communication from an alien intelligence, what is the probability that we would be able to decipher and understand it? In the world of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), this is referred to as the “Incommensurability Problem” and is a challenge that makes cracking the German ENIGMA code of World War II look easy by comparison. It is clearly one thing to ‘hear’ a message but an entirely different thing to understand a message, which moves us into areas of cognitive science and the question of whether or not we can we think like the intelligence that sent the message.

This is the issue that will be addressed by Dale Dellutri during his presentation. Dale describes his presentation Could We Understand an Alien Message as follows:

If an alien civilization sent a message, could we receive, decode, interpret, and understand it? Science fiction authors have imagined many kinds of messages: understandable to incomprehensible, friendly to dangerous. Daniela de Paulis, Artist-in-Residence at the Green Bank Observatory and the SETI Institute, designed an actual message that was as alien as possible, then arranged to have it transmitted to Earth from a spacecraft orbiting Mars. This talk describes her project and other aspects of alien messages.

Please join us for what promises to be an intriguing look our ability to communicate with aliens as it certainly won’t be as easy as the movie Project Hail Mary makes it out to be.

Could We Understand an Alien Message Meeting Details