Alien Emoji System Contains 4 Million Symbols, All of Which Mean Slightly Different Shades of 'Concerned'

The Vegan civilization's digital communication system, decoded last month by a team at Stanford, contains approximately 4 million pictographic symbols — the equivalent of emoji — and every single one expresses a variation of concern. 'There are no happy emoji,' said Dr. Kenji Murakami, who led the decoding team. 'There are no sad emoji, no angry emoji, no celebratory emoji. There are 4 million ways to say I am concerned. The granularity is extraordinary. Symbol 1 means I am slightly concerned about something nonspecific. Symbol 4,000,000 means I am concerned about the heat death of the universe and also I think I left the stove on.' The emoji system, embedded in the Vegan digital communication network intercepted by the SETI Institute, appears to serve the same function as human emoji: supplementing text-based communication with emotional context. The difference is that human emoji cover a broad emotional spectrum, while the Vegan system explores a single emotion with the depth of the Mariana Trench. 'There are emoji for being concerned about being concerned,' said Dr. Murakami. 'There are emoji for being concerned that you're not concerned enough. There are emoji for the specific type of concern you feel when someone else is not concerned about something you think they should be concerned about. That one has 50,000 variants.' Psychologists have speculated that the Vegan civilization may be, as a species, anxious. 'Four million symbols for worry is not a communication system,' said Dr. Anna Reeves, a clinical psychologist consulted on the project. 'It's a cry for help.' Humanity has responded to the Vegan civilization's latest message with a human emoji: the thumbs-up. The Vegan response, translated: 'Your casual optimism is noted and is deeply concerning to us. We have created a new symbol to express the specific type of concern we feel about your lack of concern. It is symbol 4,000,001.'