[vannrox]

Scientists have recently discovered large sequences of "junk" DNA that contain no genes and appears to be very stable.

"If ET has put a message into terrestrial organisms, this is surely where to look," said Davies.

A computer could be used to find obvious attention-grabbing patterns within these stretches of DNA, he said. If a sequence of junk units of DNA were displayed as an array of pixels on a screen and produced a simple image "the presumption of tampering would be inescapable".

The DNA code was easily big enough to contain a decent-sized novel or a potted history of the rise and fall of an alien civilisation.

[SunkenCiv]

Four character alphabet? Cuneiform-style compound characters? Unless it's a picture of a face or something along those lines, it may as well be written at the center of the Earth. :')