Humans began sending messages into space, starting in 1994 with transmission sent using the Arecibo radio telescope to a star cluster 25,000 light years from Earth.
A trio of researchers - Dimitra Atri from the University of Kansas, Julia DeMarines from the International Space University in France, and Jacob Haqq-Misra from Pennsylvania State University - offer an explanation for our failure to communicate.
The team believes that as the broadcasts became more complex and the types of content increased, the absence of an established protocol "has produced unorganized or cryptic messages that could be difficult to interpret."
They said that any future messaging protocol for messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence should account for a myriad of attributes, such as signal encoding, message length, and information content.
