but fine, let's make a large number of irrational assumptions. The ayylmaos know we exist, they've located us precisely, and they have the desire and ability to send signals which we will (somehow) recieve. What's in the signal? Uh, sir, it's just some prime numbers, and some other math constants. Fucking wild, right? A million fucking years later, we've established something resembling a dialogue between generations of aliens and humans. It's a bespoke method of communication, of course, with absolutely no resemblance to either culture's normal signals - when properly demodulated, the result has no resemblance to language, naturally. The best we can do is guess at their physiology, their culture, their way of looking at things in the broadest possible sense, based on the sorts of numbers they send us and in what order. A lot of every signal is junk, of course, we never could guess that they would think to encode sounds like that and images like this... Perhaps they don't have a sense of smell, perhaps they don't have any hearing, perhaps they're 12 feet tall rockmen, we'll never know.
