| Well practically speaking you could just use images and then have the first book as a sort of pictionary with words and pictures that demonstrate them. Once they figure out enough words they can start to figure out other words that can't easily be explained by a single picture, and grammar can be worked out from there. Sort of like the Rosetta stone. But this is useless to the post-apocalyptic hunter gatherer, civilization would have to be reestablished by then. And hopefully they at least understand the idea of writing words on paper and don't just worship it as a religious thing. There has actually been work on doing that, attempting to mark radioactive waste dumps in a way even someone in a completely different culture from a distant future could understand. It's really interesting and there is pdf on it here: http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138... If you are going to communicate with a completely alien civilization, that is one that can't even understand images, expressing information is even more difficult. My best guess is that you send a message with a really obvious pattern to it, then use that pattern as a basis for sending more information. For example, send a ton of examples of simple code in a simple programming language, and their output. They can figure out what it means. Then encode your messages in the programming language somehow. Send a simulation of 3 dimensional space and little objects in it interacting, for example. Somewhat related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ |
It could possibly be made future-proof by using a flipbook format, assuming we can find a suitably long-lived material to print on.