="Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com> Perhaps some of this "noncoding DNA" is *already* a message from the past -- e.g., intelligent dinosaurs that were destroyed 65Mya.
See John Walker's 1989 short story, "We'll Return, After This Message" http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html It's quite an amusing read from our vantage of 2016. ''Every human who'd turned his eyes skyward wondering, "Are we alone?" had been carrying the answer, all along, in every cell of his body.'' He makes the point that *coding* DNA is actually the better choice: ''Whoever wove that Message into our DNA meant it to last until we figured out how to read it‹it's built inextricably into the protein expression mechanism so any organism with a corrupted copy won't be viable. It's obvious in retrospect. If a visitor wants to leave a message, why not make it a self-reproducing, error-correcting message that any sentient race would stumble upon as soon as they undertook to reverse engineer their own design?'' Jellies Are Forever?