Towards a generalized framework for planetary communication

<p dir="ltr">We propose a theoretical framework for how to create meaningful, comprehensible, and rigorously structured messages that are sent on space missions, informally called planetary “messages in a bottle”. During the past few decades, the frequency of such messages has increased, due to the development of new technologies and space exploration activities, thus posing new questions about who, when, where, what and how any person or group of people can send such messages. In the past, these have been sent mostly by scientists, that have tried in one way or another to create, ad-hoc, “representative” and “meaningful” content. Apart from often lacking a theoretical basis for the structure of such messages, an important question that arises is “Who speaks for Earth?” In this paper, we lay down a framework based on principles of how we organize knowledge (epistemological and ontological), with examples from our own project of sending a message to the future of humanity, inscribed on a chip that will land on the surface of the Moon in the Artemis program.</p>