Structural health monitoring (SHM) is now discussed and researched for various decades. The 'date of birth' of SHM is not very well specified. Some date it back to the Comet accidents in the early 1950ies, others date it back to when composite materials came into play in aviation which was more in the 1970ies or even later. SHM has been extremely much considered for aviation but the applications are still comparatively limited. SHM business cases for aviation look to be extremely limited in case design and maintenance philosophies will not be completely changed. Aviation structures as well as their maintenance today have gained such an incredible level of safety and reliability and have so much been optimized from a design point of view and risks taken have been put very low for good reasons, that SHM in aviation has a difficulty to show a business case under current conditions. Furthermore conventional NDT with the human being's flexibility in operation can provide a much bigger data sampling than SHM with its statically positioned transducers can do. If SHM therefore wants to be competitive it must be very well designed towards the tolerable damage it has to detect reliably. This can only be done by thorough simulation before realizing an optimized SHM system. Today possibly myriads of algorithms and simulations are performed in SHM worldwide. They are all circumventing similar physical damage mechanism phenomena. But is this possibly most essential instrument for SHM truly linked together? Are WE truly communicating here as we do with all other means of communication today? The presentation will address this aspect being also linked to a project recently launched, which has only been considered as a nucleus to a much bigger task.