Someone somehow convinced themselves that this was an intelligent take.
Flip the script. If someone tries to kill us we are going to clam up and increase the Space Force budget 100000X and spend the next millennium doing nothing but building increasingly terrifying space weapons.
All someone would have to do to initiate communication with us would be to send Fibonacci numbers. This would be clearly intelligent. We could reply with some other series, then start playing ping pong with increasingly elaborate mathematical constructs to mutually construct a vocabulary. From there we could get to logic, then to statements, then to grammar, etc.
We know nothing about their minds or behavior but there is absolutely no way anything is getting into space let alone between stars unless it can do a lot of math.
And anything that can do a lot of math probably has discovered game theory and used that to analyze contact and then became too frightened to venture out, or send messages, or answer messages.
That's one potential answer to the Fermi paradox: they are out there but doing everything they can to not be noticed.
PBS Space Time had a good episode a few months ago on this: "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?" [1].
Sagan was careful*, in working on his 1966 "translation, extension, and revision" of Shklovsky's Intelligent Life in the Universe, to typographically set his contributions apart from Shklovsky's original text.
I haven't had the free time to check if there are any fibonacci sequences or other mathematical patterns in Sagan's interpolations, but it would be most amusing if there were!
Flip the script. If someone tries to kill us we are going to clam up and increase the Space Force budget 100000X and spend the next millennium doing nothing but building increasingly terrifying space weapons.
All someone would have to do to initiate communication with us would be to send Fibonacci numbers. This would be clearly intelligent. We could reply with some other series, then start playing ping pong with increasingly elaborate mathematical constructs to mutually construct a vocabulary. From there we could get to logic, then to statements, then to grammar, etc.
We know nothing about their minds or behavior but there is absolutely no way anything is getting into space let alone between stars unless it can do a lot of math.