The “Toulouse Reboot”: opening a new era in the studies on interstellar messages

In 2001, on the occasion of the 52nd IAC of Toulouse, the SETI Institute organized the first of a series of international workshops on interstellar message composition (IMC), chaired by Doug Vakoch. It was an extraordinary seminal event, where some basic principles were defined, which in the next years became a point of reference for the studies on IMC. Despite this, the original method used in Toulouse was progressively abandoned, so that the following workshops didn’t produce any original outcome and, finally, were cancelled. Now, on 18-19 December 2023, the InCosmiCon research Center at the University of Insubria (Italy) organized a new Workshop on IMC at the prestigious École Normale Superiéure of Paris. The Workshop was called “Toulouse Reboot” since its aim was to revive the original Toulouse method, trying, at the same time, to (hopefully) improve it, so creating something new, although in the mark of a substantial continuity. In this paper we’ll present the main outcomes of the Paris Workshop and their relevance for SETI. Please notice that InCosmiCon is NOT planning to send any message to other planets (because such decision should be taken by an international agreement) and does NOT pretend to create a complete message on behalf of the whole humankind (because this would be both incorrect and impossible). What we want to do is just identify an effective method to encode both scientific and cultural concepts and create a partial and incomplete message that can be proposed as a concrete tool to return to discuss this important topic within the SETI community and maybe even outside of it.