Guidelines
- A 60-120 seconds long video at 30FPS/720p minimum resolution.
- Videos should be silent (if they have an accompanying audio track, it will not be used as part of the judging for the purposes of the competition).
- Videos should aim to be as universally intelligible as possible.
- Videos can be on any topic that seems well-suited to universal communication.
- The video message represents the beginning of a message to extra-terrestrials; you should assume that little to nothing comes before it.
- Include up to 30 seconds of introductory video in English (spoken or subtitled) explaining your submission to the judges.
- Submissions are not to be shared publicly until after the competition winners have been announced.
Judging
The Interstellar Foundation has a panel of judges including scientists and media and film professionals. Each entry will be judged on how it meets the two criteria of universal intelligibility and informativeness.
PRizes
- The winning video will receive a $2,000 prize.
- The two runners up receive $500 each.
- The winning team will be invited to collaborate with the Interstellar Foundation and its team of scientists and film industry professionals in developing and producing one of our upcoming messages (to the moon, another planet, or into space).
- The winning team may also have the opportunity to work on a message going into interstellar space on a space probe in the early 2030s.
Getting Started
Our video must be as universal as possible. When planning and reviewing your creation, try to put yourselves in the position of a creature with no comprehension of human language. It might help to try to put yourself in the mind of a chimpanzee, or a dolphin. How would you convey information to such recipients? Are you confident the way you've presented our message would work for an intelligent chimpanzee or dolphin?
Considerations
Linguistic intelligibility. Think about how your view of the world is shaped by our language. ETI won’t have this background context. Try to restrict the messages to simple concepts that can be conveyed without language – but the challenge is to make them interesting concepts too!
Cultural intelligibility. Think about how our history constrains our way of thinking. Social and political hierarchical systems may be completely different on another planet. What if they don’t have cities? Or don’t have nuclear families? Or have more than two parents each? Be sure that the images you present show what these things are like on Earth, but in a way that someone who has never seen such a thing can understand.
Make creative use of universal concepts. There are many shared processes that arise from physical and biological laws. Some examples of the concepts that a technological alien civilization is bound to understand include:
- Formation of the Solar System.
- Physical conditions of early Earth.
- Precursors to life (cellular compartmentalization).
- Simple early life (autotrophs, particularly photosynthesis).
- Adaptation, selection, and evolution.
- Movement
- Predation
- Transition to land.
- Collective behavior.
- Humanity and sociality.
- Technology
- Modern space age.
- Computation and AI.
You can see how this sequence of events plays out in the example video, but use your own set of universals about humanity, and portray them in a way that you feel is universally understandable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can submit a video?
Everyone and anyone: film or space enthusiasts, content creators, media professionals, high school students, retirees. Some experience in content creation and video editing will certainly be useful.
Why Use Video?
The biggest challenge to an extraterrestrial trying to decode a message from Earth would be the lack of context. Still images, text, diagrams, or audio recordings may be meaningless to a creature without the social, cultural, and historical context for decoding the message. A video can show physical context (for example, panning to show surroundings), scale (zooming in and out), and interactions in time – like seeing a ball being thrown, and then being caught. What’s more, a video best approximates what extraterrestrials would actually experience themselves if they actually landed on Earth!
What if the aliens don’t have eyes like us? Doesn’t that make video useless?
These technological aliens must also be able to sense their environment in a detailed way. They may not have eyes like us, it’s true, but they must have some spatial perception, and video is just a series of raster frames, say in computer memory. Even if the receiver of the message senses their world with sonar, instead of with light, they will be able to convert the bitstream of the message into a format they can perceive directly, just as we do with digital representation of video.
What makes a message universally intelligible?
We are counting on the recipients being alien scientists who have at least as much understanding of the universe as we do. We can rely on the fact that they will recognize what our astronomy looks like and what our fundamental biology is – even if their own biology is very different. They are likely to recognize facts about physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The message must be based on principles that we expect aliens to grasp – we can’t assume they share our history or our culture.
What are the important features of a message?
We want our video message to be universally intelligible but also informative. We don’t just want an alien civilization to know that we exist and that we have technology, but we want them to understand who we are, and to want to communicate with us, in peace. They should be able to understand our message, but also to be interested in it.
What makes a message informative?
The message needs to provide information about us humans and about planet Earth. For this reason, sending nothing more than mathematical patterns is not enough – such a message might be intelligible, but not informative. Tell them about where we humans came from, about nature of life on Earth, about how we live in diverse societies. Think of what you’d like to know about an alien civilization and tell them the same things about our own!
What can we assume about the aliens?
If they have the technology to receive our message, we can assume that they must live in societies and cooperate with each other. That also means that they must have something that functions in the way our language does. Of course, that language may not be spoken, and it may not even be made of words and sentences – we can assume nothing specific about their language, except that it exists. We are also assuming that the receiving civilization has a good understanding of certain scientific principles. They will understand something about how planets are formed, and something about the evolution of life. Even if life on their planet has taken a very different course to our own, there will be some things that are in common: the origin of life from non-life; the increasing complexity of life; and the tendency of some organisms to live in groups (as they must, if they are to cooperate to build technology).
How much information should we try to include in the video?
Our goal is to send a much longer video message to extra-terrestrials, slowly building a basis for communication with increasing complexity at each step. This video competition is about the first step: establishing the initial basis for communication. Later parts of the video can add additional layers of information (sound, color, words, sentences) and more complex detail about humans and life on Earth. But for the first part of the video, we are trying to establish a way of communicating potentially with creatures that even have a different way of perceiving meaning. Therefore, we want to stick to simple concepts. Still, we aim for even the initial part to be interesting – if extraterrestrials never figure out the rest, they will learn something interesting about humanity or Earth. Do not try to include everything about humans and about Earth – this is not intended to be an encyclopedia!
SubmiSSION Form
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