Entire Alien Message Turns Out to Be a Single Extremely Long Word

A transmission from the Andromeda galaxy received in 1979 and decoded over the ensuing forty-seven years has been revealed to consist of a single word. The word is 2.4 million phonemes long and, when fully translated, contains the complete history, philosophy, science, and cultural output of the transmitting civilization. 'It's an agglutinative language taken to its logical extreme,' said Dr. Beatrice Fontaine, who has led the decoding effort since 2003. 'Each morpheme attaches to the previous one, adding meaning. The first morpheme means existence. The second modifies it to mean the first moment of existence. The third adds in a place that is dark. By morpheme 50,000, we're deep into their Bronze Age.' The word, which researchers have been unable to pronounce in its entirety because doing so would take approximately fourteen years of continuous speech, begins with cosmological origins and ends with what appears to be a recipe for a fermented beverage. 'The last 200 morphemes are definitely a recipe,' confirmed Dr. Fontaine. 'After 2.4 million phonemes of history, science, and philosophy, they end with instructions for making what we think is beer. It's either a profound philosophical statement about the cyclical nature of civilization or they were just thirsty when they finished.' The language has no spaces, no punctuation, and no sentence boundaries. Meaning is determined entirely by the sequence of morphemes and their relative positions within the word. 'English speakers think German compound words are long,' said Dr. Fontaine. 'German has nothing on this. Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft is a child's toy compared to a word that contains an entire civilization's accumulated knowledge.' The decoding team has published the first 100,000 morphemes in a paper that runs to 3,400 pages. The remaining 2.3 million morphemes are projected to fill a publication equivalent in length to approximately 80,000 novels. Dr. Fontaine plans to retire before the translation is complete. 'My contribution was the Neolithic period,' she said. 'I'm proud of my section. Someone else can handle the Industrial Revolution.'