Decoding ET

Receiving a signal from the stars would be a momentous event, but it would only begin a process.  Understanding the message sent might be the real challenge.

A new book published by NASA looks at how difficult it's been to understand the writings of dead human civilizations-- Sumerian, Egyptian, Maya, etc.-- even though we have the same brain organization those people had, and we perceive the world in basically the same way.  As we'll have no idea how an intelligent alien might think, the book argues, decoding the signal might be much more difficult than some SETI advocates seem to assume.