The Human Message
The Human Message addresses two related questions:
What should a message contain in order to represent the human species?
And what characteristics should the message itself possess in order to be recognized, interpreted and answered by another technological species?
The first question — explored for decades through a variety of interstellar messaging projects, from the Arecibo message onward — still appeared to me the more elusive and difficult to answer. So I started with the second one.
The second question seemed more promising, because I could define the ideal characteristics of such a message regardless of whether they were technically feasible or not. I identified four:
Once I had clearly in mind that an effective message should be representative, self-contained, interactive and capable of generating new information through each interaction, I could return to the first question.
And this immediately raised another one:
What is the human species? In a nutshell, what defines us as a species?
A biobehavioral model of humanity
Rather than representing humanity through particular technologies, cultures or historical events, I developed a working model based on six core biobehavioral characteristics and one fundamental dynamic relationship.
The model was developed first and subsequently compared with research from several disciplines in order to test and support its underlying assumptions.
1. Social species
Humans are organized in small groups of interdependent individuals, providing the biological and behavioral basis for both cooperation and conflict.
2. Modification of the environment
Humans modify — often radically — and adapt natural environments to their needs, leading toward what I call Urbanized Dominating Ecosystems.
3. Tools as body augmentation
Humans use tools to extend the capabilities of the body, creating a continuous path from elementary implements to technology and machines.
4. Emotional interpretation of reality
Human perception, imagination and interpretation are strongly shaped by basic emotions such as fear, grief, love and rage. Reality is not simply observed: it is continuously interpreted. This is one of the paths leading toward storytelling.
5. Architecture mindset
Human thought tends to organize reality through objects, functions, relationships and structures. Experiences can therefore be decomposed, recombined and represented as structured mental models. This provides another path toward storytelling.
6. The interaction between emotion and structure
Characteristics 4 and 5 operate together: emotion assigns meaning and relevance, while architectural thought gives experience structure. Their interaction transforms experience into representations that can be remembered, communicated and reinterpreted.
7. Storytelling
Humans organize experiences, actors, intentions, causes and possibilities into communicable structures. Storytelling contributes to the emergence of society, politics, religion, art, exploration and science, expressed differently across human cultures.
Further discussion and supporting literature
Urbanized Dominating Ecosystems
I use the term Urbanized Dominating Ecosystems to describe environments extensively transformed around human needs. Urbanized does not simply mean urban: cities, villages, cultivated fields, roads, gardens and managed landscapes are all different expressions of ecosystems reorganized by human activity.
Human modification is also perceptual. Our environments are filled with visual, acoustic, olfactory and symbolic signals that influence behavior and the way we experience space. Other species do this too: a lion's roar can instantly alter another animal's perception of the safety of its surroundings. Human environments differ, however, in the scale and complexity of this process.
I call this informational and perceptual layer the perceptive ecosystem: humans modify their environments, and those modified environments continuously influence human perception and behavior in return.