Slashdot Mirror
Is There Anybody Out There?
DrZoom writes "The Astronomy Picture of the Day for Jan 9, 2001 is an image sent into space by the Cosmic Call
project. This is yet another interesting picture from APOD." Try to figure it out without reading the solution.
imagine that. a series of primes. i could've guessed without having to actually look at the damn picture.
They really should have made his wang bigger.
It would have raised our status in the intergalactic empire.
The two maps that you call pangea + partially split continents are just 2 halves of one map - a normal equiarea projection of our earth's surface *today* . Yes, Asia and africa really are THAT big. Don't forget, to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat plane, you have to distort it. The system these people used is in fact "fairer" than most maps you'll have seen - giving equal weighting to the land area of every continent. Look at a globe some time (the only really fair way to represent the earth's surface), and imagine how their map would be wrapped around it - it'd be a better fit than the normal rectangular projection maps.
Is it just me that thinks sending this message out was irresponsible?
This message reveals quite a bit of information about us. A receiver will know not only details about our solar system, but even fundamental details of how we are constructed (DNA, etc.). The message also reveals quite a bit about the resources of our solar system.
If this message is received by smart aliens intent on conquering systems then from this info they given that knowledge they should be able to build a weapon to wipe us off the face of this planet.
Whilst there are many people that theorise that aliens capably of interstellar travel will be friendly there are no guarantees. By sending this message we may have doomed us all to death, or enslavement.
sigh. did you even attempt to decipher the message? there's nothing in there that cannot be said (with even fewer pixels) using ordinary "glyphs".
the real (non-slashdot) explanation can be found in the cosmic call press release:
The message has been built to minimize the loss of information due to noise introduced into the signal during its interstellar flight. To minimize the risk of confusion, a set of characters was created which are fairly different from each other. Redundant information is included to allow cross-checking of the message
5,010,240,000 Hz
l
As detailed in page 21 of the message: http://pages.infinit.net/lachapel/seti/page21.htm
And wouldn't _that_ be an interesting message to get as a reply from an alien civilisation :)
Actually there is a one pixel wide frame around every page, so it would not be very difficult to discover it.
I am somewhat forced to agree, considering the difficulty finding intelligent life on just this planet...
This is nice in some ways, but it seems pretty bizarre to go to all this effort to teach them decimal and kilograms. Why not make things more universal by using binary exclusively for numbers? Why not use a more "universal" measure of weight, like the weight of a proton? Why go to the effort of teaching them meters, seconds, and kilograms?
Sheesh, they even use superscript notation for exponents! Just explain about brackets, and use "^"!
--
Xenu loves you!
what they didn't show you is the last page of the series, that shows how to decode TV signals so that they can watch leave it to beaver. In contact they sent plans on how to make a space ship... I'm pretty sure we would send plans on how to make a TV.
It wasn't too difficult to decode, but I still
have one question: how did they decide on those
sybols to represent digits? Why not something
simpler, maybe 7-segment LED-style numerals, for example?
I'm not convinced by your argument. Each digit symbol in the message is 5x7 pixels. You can easily represent our digit symbols in that resolution.
Looking at the thing, I assume the white is 0 and black 1 and I can only wonder why they didn't do it the other way around. white 1, black 0, after all, there is more white on this page than back, and what is more noticeable? an absence of signal or a signal?
Ahh but the whole message is a signal, 1 or 0. If I recall the transmission is made so that a 0 is one frequency and a 1 another (FM). The carrier is there no matter what is transmitted so it really makes no difference whether it is mostly 1s or mostly 0s.
I knew I should have put a smiley on it for the humor impaired. Sheesh.
Do you really think any race capable of receiving this doesn't already know what a prime number is? They'll just moderate us to -1, and if we're lucky someone will tell us, "Duh! Go away you damn trolls, we know that already."
And wouldn't _that_ be an interesting message to get as a reply from an alien civilisation :)
;)
I say bring it on. We've had 21 years of practice at repelling Space Invaders, and that's with only one gun.
Presumably, if we're smart enough to throw squiggles at them and they're smart enough to read them, it should work both ways. Especially considering the time it'll take their squiggles to get back.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Does anyone know why they are the way they are? I guess one of he design considerations was to fill out the cell more than our regular symbols so that it would be clearer whether a "white" pixel was part of a symbol or not. This makes spacing easier to comprehend. Any other thoughts?
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Just like the Canadian commercials:
"2**3021377 - 1, a prime number to call our own"
What about the Dinosaurs?
The Dinosaurs didn't kill *themselves* off.. they just got screwed by a very large rock.
--
Delphis
Because assuming that space aliens understand English would be pathetically stupid? If Star Trek has taught us nothing else - and it hasn't - its that all sentient biengs in the universe speak English as their mother tongue. This is of course at odds with the beliefs of the hitchhikers who get around that by sticking a fish in their ear.
I hope the encoded message doesn't have as many typos and grammar mistakes as the english translation I've been reading!
> To make an assumption based on current data, we have 1 civilization that has not managed to kill itself off, and 0 civilizations that have not. ... I realize until we have at least ONE civilization that HAS killed itself off, we won't be able to do a real comparison
What about the Dinosaurs?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"...And this is the ultimate evil."
"So when does it come?"
"If this is the five... and this is the one... Every 5000 years."
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
I see the hidden agenda here - slowly, but surely, we are broadcasting all of Earth's pornography into space. This way, when the hammer finally comes down on the perverts here, we will have ensured the preservation of one of our most precious resources. Brilliant.
Whilst some elements of this message are very clever and clearly show a great deal of thought I find other elements very odd.
As others have pointed out, the inclusion of the largest currently known prime is rather odd and would probably not help decode the message. It also introduces concepts like "raising to a power" in a very human-centric manner. Using some form of operator as is done for many other mathematical symbols would probably be much easier to understand. There is little point in using representative systems borrowed from our own evolved systems, rather than going for a totally new and clear system. Using a simpler base, such as binary, and maybe a system using postfix rather than infix notation.
The symbols themselves seem to owe something to existing symbols, several of the numbers and symbols such as equality appear to be based upon our own symbols, I would have thought that using totally arbitrary symbol, with a great deal of redundancy (to allow for the inevitable noise and degradation in the recieved message) would make more sense.
The use of arrows and lines pointing to graphs seems also to represent traditional human ways of doing things.
Overall the message appears to be trying to say so many different things. I think they may have been better off trying to explain a few more simple concepts repeatedly, and in different manners, rather than try and show how "clever" we are.
Actually it is rocket science...
Ok, I don't want to nitpick, but wouldn't their base be 14 (assuming they have two 'hands')?
The symbols are designed to withstand some noise on the transmitted signal. They are sufficiently big, and different, that a few flipped pixels will not turn them into another symbol, and confuse the recipient.
Also, the code is sent in the form of simple images so that it is easy to include a few drawings. The invidual pages are also outlined by a single pixel, which should make it really easy to figure out that you're on the right track when you try to decode the message.
also.... the 'largest known prime' has all kinds of useful properties... it can be used as a chronometer... a sign that we're still kicking... our rate of technological advancement... a whole bunch of things. (some assume we send multiple msgs with a different 'largest prime'... btw there's a new largest prime since this was published)
Then again... they won't hear the msg for another 300+ earth yrs.
Numbers are universal in many cultures. Well, the whole numbers are. We assume that it isn't an Earthly occurance in nature.
e ci bo.html
How to translate a one dimensional string into a two dimentional diagram? More math. Not sure how to get 127x127 but for a previous message into space see:
http://planetary.org/html/seti/seti-messages-ar
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
2 + 2 = 4 (base 10)
2 + 2 = 11 (base 3)
FunOne
FunOne
Thraag to Earth...Please retransmit page 00000.
Seriously though - I wonder whether the diagrams
would come across as anything meaningful. The
various arrows and graphing conventions seem
very human-centered.
I was concerned that we sent them the value
of Pi without a trailing '...' symbol. It
kinda implies that we think it ends after
the 51 billionth place or so. I guess aliens
who actually bother to search through their
100 billion places for those last digits would
realise that we know that though. Still - it
would have been nice to be more rigerous.
The whole base-10 arithmetic thing was silly
though. They should have studied the size of
the character set they needed for the message
and picked the highest power-of-two base possible
within the limits of the transmission technology.
(Probably hex - but certainly octal).
In the first page, I'd have taken more space
and put the numbers one to a line to make it
clearer and more certain.
Still, it's a good start.
www.sjbaker.org
Hydrogen * Pi _might_ make sense - but anything
that's an interesting number of GigaHertz would
only be meaningful to critters with 10 fingers,
positional numbering schemes and the same
definition of a second as us.
If they use (for example) Roman numerals, they
are gonna have a hard enough time decoding the
message as it is!
www.sjbaker.org
If they respond, they'll (presumably) realise
that we'll receive their reply hundreds of years
after we sent our message.
If they understood the message we sent then
they know that humans only live for less than
100 years (I think that was in there somewhere)
so they should guess that we may have forgotten
that we sent it - or what it was that we sent.
It follows that intelligent aliens would define
their terms in the same way we did - I think
if I were them, I'd prefix my reply with a duplicate of the original message on the grounds
that this would be the format that humans would
be most likely to be able to detect and decode.
www.sjbaker.org
After hours of deliberation and a pass through my extra-terrestrial bound communications decoding algorithm, i find that the message reads
FIRST POST!!!!
I read it and I understool it as:
.. x b) -1
eg.
AB = A*10 + B
not
AB = A + B
which is the simplest.
And what about that expoent? Where is it explained that b^e-1 = (b x b x
Do we assume that they are using our notation and not polish notation? What about Martian notation? Where did we explain to them what multiplication looks like? What about expoents?
I think it's done very badly.
He was joking right? right?
someone please tell me he was joking.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
In answer to your question, yes, I did figure out that they were going after largest prime found so far at the bottom. I basically arrived at the same deciphering that you had. I knew that every time someone find a new largest prime, it's always of the form 2^x-1. So I knew that's what they were going after. However, I spent a fair amount of time in a completely futile attempt to figure out where they got that minus sign from. I also couldn't figure out that figure in the top center of the page, which they don't bother to explain on the solution page. I noticed the binary representation for "1" in both the upper left and right corners, and tried to find some way to interpret it as a "number line" (even though the center symbol was not a zero) in order to find something that distinguished between the concepts of "positive" and "negative" from which I could deduce the meaning of the other symbol as a minus sign. But I suspect those were just page numbers :-).
But I've got some other questions that I hope someone else can answer:
1) How are the aliens supposed to convert a *stream* of bits into a TWO DIMENSIONAL image??? We're not shipping a piece of paper out in a capsule here.
2) Why do we assume they can turn this stream into two dimensions?
3) Why do we assume they even know they *ought* to?
4) How are they supposed to know the dimensions of the image?
5) And even if they can figure all that out, what makes us think they read left-to-right, top-to-bottom? How many of us would dhave found this image just as easy to parse if it were flipped vertically, or horizontally?
6) And wouldn't it be easier to do a lexical analysis if all the individual symbols consisted of a *single* connected component, rather than multiple non-intersecting "brush strokes" (see, e.g. the symbol for "2" that contains three separate pieces).
> should aliens send back their own decoder in,
> say, base 29,
... we'd know they have 29 fingers. And given that this is a prime number, I'd guess they'd all be on one hand. I can't wait to see what these freaks look like.
Because something that you or I would consider very simple would probably only BE simple because it relied on lots of knowledge that we already had and convention that we already followed.
its done, IMHO, to provide a level of abastraction and make the mathematics easier to read.
even the romans realized that to write the number 1000, it would be easier to abstract with M than it would be to IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII...(you get the picture).
Hmm alienux? Isn't xeno alien? Then that's
be xenix right?
Well, if you've seen any sci-fi movies in the 50s or 60s, you'll realize that its better for US to find them, rather than for US to just broadcast out and leave it to chance. If we find them before they find us, we have the chance to prepare the planet.
Otherwise we find out that our message really said: "Eat at Joe's. Humans are tasty." as thousands of alien's drop ship to the surface...
Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
Looks like a game of centipede to me... that or any other 80's arcade game.
--
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
\/\/3 6r3 133t h6><0r5, p133z 53nd fr33 t3chn0109y!
I couldn't resist
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Seemed pretty obvious to me. After a list of the lowest primes it suddenly goes to a new line with a new format show the symbol for 2 then a number in a new relationship to the 2 (they know our number system from the previous stuff) followed by a symbol then 1. Seems obvious it is a Mersenne Prime.
Some of the original broadcasts sent from Arecibo were far more confusing than this this almost kindegarten level in comparison. Which was my complaint with the previous messages. Although superscripting is not explained it surely wouldn't take long for a team of mathematicians / scientists to figure it out.
Peter
Bitter and proud of it.
Why is there some preoccupation with sending out a message that is highly undecipherable even by humans? Shouldn't the message be very simple, needing almost no translation, other than the binary structure itself which is a challenge as well.
I DID get it by telnet. While they could send this out as HTML, they CAN'T send it out by HTTP, since we don't even know "they" are out there (and of course HTTP is an "on demand" protocol.
I was assuming that they would be sending it out plain text, where, of course, extra ^Ms will cause problems for any UNIX using being.
Actually, my original post it wrong. I was pretty groggy when I wrote it. Stair stepping happens when crlf is expected, but only lf is recieved. (makes sense, no "return" to the start of the line.)
-Peter
PS: Way to take a silly post WAY to seriously!
PPS: forgive me if there is anything "weird" about this post, I am posting from lynx.
A lot of this sounds very familiar. I can't imagine why.
No insult intended to the creators, who have taken a good idea and actually implemented it. Very cool.
-Puk
I got it, but it seems rather culturally specific.
It's not clear to me primes of that form would be
so well known to a completely independant
Mathematical culture. (It's not even clear to me
that Natural numbers need to be a dominant notion
in the development of Mathematics, but I suppose
they had to use something of the sort.)
Alex.
Probably no one would understand that.
IIRC some scientist made similar message, and gave it to his collagues. Result no one did understand the message. Message was supposed to be as simple as possible.
-- ++
I know NASA didnt send this but communication should be like programming. Keep out the fluff or at least be consistent. The binary representation ends after the ninth digit. They should either take it out or extend binary for full alphabet of digits mapping legend. And the large prime at the bottom presumes exponentiation is represented in a very human way, not to mention that how do they know the minus sign? And the heading at top of page is extra noise too. They should keep it simple and tear out the extra stuff so as not to confuse any intelligence trying to decrypt our mathematical hello.
Some parts of it would be easy for an alien who has already figured out the base ten, positional, left-to-right stuff which the first part of the page is supposed to teach. For example, we've just been reading a list of prime numbers, and then we get to a big complicated looking number. I immediately said to myself, "This is gonna be a prime number, and a big one." I didn't immediately expect it to involve a power of two minus one, but there are a whole bunch of primes of this form. So when our alien mathematician sees:
2 [symbol] 3021377 [symbol] 1
, he/she/it can pretty quickly guess that the first symbol is "exponentiate", and the second is "subtraction".
But that isn't what we see. Instead of a symbol for exponentiation, we see a superscript. This is a big fat clue for humans like me, but completely cryptic as far as aliens are concerned. It makes it inobvious as to how the line should be read, as it breaks the left-to-right-then-down-a-line rule that we've just been trying to establish.
Secondly, if you're gonna make up symbols, you could at least make up ones that make sense. The "1", "3" and "4" in this character set are OK; they've all got a vertical bar at the left, and then 1, 3 or 4 strokes respectively coming off that bar. Why not continue this theme through all the numbers? (OK, so there's not enough pixels to do that literally, but you get the idea.) And the idea of using a half-line shift upwards to signify exponentiation is just deeply wrong.
i found a mistake on page 2 of thier alian manual where they said 0/1=1. i e-mailed them and told them they should change it because it could mess up the aliens...if they exist. maybe they should put me in charge of their shit because i would fire the shit out of whoever made that mistake.
...would have been to have defined the M. prime formula using their previously defined symbols. Namely, 3 = 2^2-1, 5 = 2^3-1, etc. and then "symbol for largest prime we've found" = 2^3021377-1 then the final page "question mark symbol (what is the largest M. prime YOU have found)" = 2^"question mark symbol"-1
A side note on that, I think the method used to signify that we use base ten was good. Re-use of symbols to demonstrate up to 15, pictorial reference of the numbers and of course binary backing it all up..
Oh... oops :)
:)
Okay, I didn't actually see that there were multiple pages. Now I click on a few more links, I see that there are quite a number of pages that describe a lot more interesting things (including the first page).
It's kind of a pity that the story doesn't link directly to these more intereting URLs...
But thanks for pointing that out... I'll go finish my nice, tasty slice of humble pie now
That Mersenne prime gives away too much information. It gives anyone who receives the message an estimate of our level of computer technology.
If you've seen the movie Contact, it's entirely possible to encode details information into a signal that can first be interpreted as a simple artificial signal. If they're smart (or lucky) they'll figure out that there's more to the information that just recognizable tones and beeps. I'm not sure if we as humans are intelligent enough to encode a signal as complex as the one in Contact, but hey, we created the movie and that signal was part of the story :) so maybe if writers can hack together an interplanetary greeting along with scientific intelligence, maybe SETI can too :)
And in the typical troll fashion, they didn't get it.
heh.
-the wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
The first page is easy enough to figure out, even with the new - symbol. Once the alien scientist has understood base 10, it's just a short step to understanding that this is a list of prime numbers, and from there it is a short step to realise that big primes are frequently of the form 2**X-1. Once they've made that leap they will either marvel at our mathematical ingenuity, or laugh at it.
Turns out they intended this to mean 2**3021377 - 1, which they claim is the largest prime found at the time this was written.
:)
Christ, I stared at it for a while and still couldn't figure it out. Good work!
This seems unnecessarily confusing for some poor alien trying to figure it out. In one step, they introduce a new symbol (without any context), indicating substraction, a method of denoting exponents (without introducing exponents), all to describe a number that provides someone trying to decode it no clue as to what the new symbol and new denotation mean.
Excellent point. I think they should have just kept going with the primes until they filled the page with them.
Leave it to two Canadian scientists to want to show off the size of their prime...
(Sorry, couldn't resist.
--
Apparently I got my correction posted after you loaded the comments page and before you posted yours. :)
You're absolutely right -- it was just the East-Up orientation that prevented me from realizing precisely what I was looking at.
--
Take a closer look at the symbols - especially the 7 8 9 - they are quite close to modern arabic numbers.
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
Thankfully, you wont have to worry about it. The soonest anyone could know about this is between 140 and 200 years from now. Your great great great great great great great great great great grandchildren may have to deal with the problem, though!
What you both refer to is in facat the Dymaxion (Air-Ocean) World Projection. It was published by R. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao in 1954. This is an especially poor representation of that projection. It lacks most of the features that make the real map useful such as each icosa triangle face is (circa 1954!) 7 ship-days/14 aircraft hours. Really, why send this out to space?
It's the largest prime number that the human race has discovered -- it demonstrates our level of math sophistication. This is a motif later repeated when we show that the 112th element is the last one we've discovered (our level of sophistication in physics), a number of mathematical constants, and also in the final page where we ask what the largest prime THEY have discovered is.
I think it's an excellent benchmark of our level of technology. A simple concept yet difficult to solve, much like a chess game -- if they were able to send back the rules to a "perfect game" (where the first to move in chess always wins) it would then demonstrate that their level of technology is greater than ours (I might suggest that we'll be able to compute the "perfect game" in the next 100 years at our current rate of advancement in computers).
So, with this information, if the alien species were to send a signal back, they would at least have a rule of thumb as to our ability to decode the message.
So I might ask the question of you: how would YOU demonstrate our level of math knowledge? Could you do it any better than the ~15 characters that they used?
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
I find this very curious...
But this prime number transmission is actually cool and should motivate people further in searching for new largest known prime . Imagine one of the first things another civilization reads is your prime!
Something for your great great... ...great great grand children to brag about.
Looking at the first 16 posts I am not convinced there is any intelligent life out there.
But if there is alien life, it must be intelligent, because they haven't contacted us.
Gorg: What in Spalad 7 is wrong with my visual communicator?
Zerv: Mine too! I was looking at the lovely images of Natali... Damn Earthlings!
Gorg: Why do those infernal beasts send us these pictures? What do they mean?
Zerv: We should destroy them at once!
Gorg: Activate the BFG!
Zerv: This is for all that "Touched By An Angel" you sent too!
This
It is obviously a ploy to get alien women interested in cross-stitch so that we can take the alien men out to topless bars. It has got to be the ugliest pattern I have ever seen though.
Since a superior alien race would definately have an HTML complaint browser, their browser almost definately won't display the HTML with the extra character on the end. And ^M^J was the standard long before UNIX came around and shortened it to just ^J. (Originally, on teletypes, the ^M would slowly start the carriage back to the beginning, hence "carriage return" and the ^J would then move the paper up a line, hence "new line." This becomes pointless on these fancy monitor thingies, so most modern OSes use just one character.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I guessed it might be the largest prime, but I don't know, and neither would they. The most arbitrary aspect of it is the use of superscript text to indicate a power. Two new math operations in one step... kinda stupid. Are the following pages of the message available? I would be curious to see them.
The minus sign is defined on page 2 of the message. Also, in response to a post above (sazlo #34) the exponential system is described on page 3.
--
01 13 19
TVDJC TDSLR AZNGT NWQSH KPN
The first page is here. I suggest spending some time on each one. This stuff is fascinating.
--
--
Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
I don't believe one information theorist, mathematician or engineer was behind this.
Their use of '010' and '101' to make 0s and Xs is not particularly resistant to transmission errors.
Loss of sync makes makes them far closer.
The most resistant code is '111' for 1 and '000' for 0.
Quite why they decided to waste space explaining base 10 is an anathema to me. They've used unary (the small 2x2 dots) and binary (the 'ox' stuff) already, why confuse matters with a third radix.
They're a couple of years out of date w.r.t. the larges prime known too.
Note - the single pixel border isn't a single pixel - it's 2 pixels wide. One is on one line, the other os on the next line. TVs don't put half of the colourburst on one side of the frame and one half of it on the other side of the frame, does it?
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
There are two ways. Symmetry doesn't work
I_think
_that_U
_should
_see_my
_point.
I_thi
nk_th
at_U_
shoul
d_see
_my_p
oint.
Of course correlation measures will tell them which is more likely.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Maybe its not too bad to do the things you mention "in a very human-centric manner". Because isn't the meaning of this project making some earthling messages over to space?
Marvin Minsky (the "father" of AI) wrote an excellent paper on the topic: Communication with Alien Intelligence. In the references section he mentions a great book (Freudenthal, Hans. LINCOS, North-Holland, 1960) written by a Dutch mathematician which is a message for aliens. Marvin says of the book, "LINCOS drafts a detailed scenario for communicating with aliens. He begins with elementary mathematics and shows how many other ideas, including social ideas, might be based on that foundation. Some of Freudenthal's constructions seem very profound."
-ken kahn
The idea is...... that we are trying to establish a protocol for communication with whoever this message may reach. Of course they would know primes, but if they talk to us and say "adawq, adwe, aeaw!, adw!, awd !vyxvtw!", how are we going to understand them? The idea with these pages are that they will be able to decrypt the message, and see that it comes from "intelligent" beings that know prime numbers. Now if you receive a series of primes from outer space, would you dismiss that as "Stupid attention seeking idiots, I know this already!" instead of thinking "Someone is out there!"? Think broader.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Amnesiac aliens are monitoring my every move from the 10th planet and beaming them to DrZooms brain. /.
I stumbled over this page last nite for the first time ever, after clicking through Yahoo in boredom(Science/Astronomy/Humour).
A few hours later, its on
"Just because they're out to get you doesnt mean you're not paranoid"
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
I think "they'd" be able to pick it up because it's beamed directly at an area of space - it's a relatively string and tight beam. The general emissions our planet gives off are (at that distance) very weak and diffuse.
Better the pride that resides in a Citizen of the world, than the pride that divides when a colourful rag is unfurled
I know it may seem pedantic but we do know of dead civilisations - the Incas come to mind.
If you're thinking 'intelligent' species Neanderthal man was made extinct by Cro Magnon (sp?) man (out direct ancestors). We have made many species on this planet extinct.
You seem to be assuming that the count of 1 live civilisation (i.e. man kind) versus 0 extinct ones proves something. It doesn't: if we're killed off instead of 1-0 we get 0-1 but there's no-one left to keep score so it doesn't matter does it?
Until we find proof of other planets that support (or supported) inteligent life then one cannot make this kind of extrapolation! Also if you do use 1/0 = infinity then we would have already contacted and been contacted by ETs!
Better the pride that resides in a Citizen of the world, than the pride that divides when a colourful rag is unfurled
Looking at the thing, I assume the white is 0 and black 1 and I can only wonder why they didn't do it the other way around. white 1, black 0, after all, there is more white on this page than back, and what is more noticeable? an absence of signal or a signal?
Just my 2 cents
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
and on making water, they find out that it is highly toxic. In fact it wipes out almost all life on their planet. In addition to wiping out most life on Earth including himself, Man has also managed to destroy ET.
Whilst all this looks wonderful, it already assumes you see an image. What is actually transmitted is (presumably) a bit stream. How do you decode this into being an image?
Actually I did work out that that was the largest prime found to date, but only because I had heard of Mersenne Primes before (which is any prime of the form 2^n-1). However, I entirely agree with all the negative comments aimed at the simultaneous introduction of both exponentiation and subtraction. Sending prime numbers on the other hand. A very good idea. Sean Seefried
Funily enough my first reaction was to try to read the puzzle from right to left. It kinda seems natural to me. I then found it strange how Western minded thinkers always create puzzles from right to left. I wonder if any E.T. would have a bias to one direction of thinking.
Anyway, a Hebrew or Arabic puzzle would have just been a mirror image I guess. And I am sure this puzzle will get distorted on transit by not being in the ET's network byte order.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
just nod if you can hear me,
Is there anyone at home?
--------
numbers
.operators
..logic operators
...decompression algorithm (is message size an issue?)
then encode stuff like:
chemistry class, genome..
electrics class, processor design
etc, etc
what technology should we share with them?
i0n
image 11 was interesting, the solution is "for complaints, aim your missiles here"
- Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder -
Well, you must realize that, although we normally operate in base 10, we can operate in binary (base 2), and, should aliens send back their own decoder in, say, base 29, we'll be able to decode it as well.
Quoth the zombie, braaaaaaaains
Some amateur future M13 radio archeaologist will then accidentally discover this weak radio signal and wonder where the hell it came from!
Actually, it's the vocabulary that comes from Latin (via French, for the most part). English grammar is quite different from that of other European languages, but is more Germanic than anything else.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
Screw the prime number series crap!
What this REALLY translates to is:
ATTENTION...ATTENTION...
FOLLOW THE ANGLE OF THIS RADIO BEACON BACK TO A PLANET FULL OF MORONS FAT ENOUGH TO HAVE TIME ENOUGH TO BROADCAST THEIR IGNORANCE ABOUT BEING ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE. NEED FOOD? COME EAT US! NEED SLAVES? COME ENSLAVE US! NEED A TARGET PLANET? AIM THIS-A-WAY!
Ever notice that a radio dish is really just a big dish?
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
It's a multi-page message with lots of redundancy. They define all of the symbols in greater detail on another page.
I recognized it only because Mersenne primes were covered in a book I read as a kid (Excursions in Number Theory). This formula was considered interesting for a couple of other reasons (which I forget) from Euler.
A society with a history in number theory may have run across this same thing; I've never seen it anywhere else. Naturally there's a web page for it.
I must go across the street and get you your orange Schuuur-Bert........ why do i feel like drinking a coke ?
The basic problem here is that aliens, by their very nature, are alien so we can't assume anything about how they will react to a given set of stimulie. However for an endevour of this nature to work you have to make certain asumptions. An obvious one to make is that alien geeks (scientists and engineers) are going to be a little like human geeks in the way they think. Give any scientist or engineer a proboblem and sooner or later they are going to grab some paper and a pencil and start drawing diagrams. Therefore we assume that aliens trying to decode this message are going to notice that there are large strings of 1's regularly spaced and maybe try using them as the boundry of an image. Once they do this they will see that there are repeating symbols throughout the frames they create this way. This will hopefully cause them to realise that what they have is a 2D image in which information is convayed through symbolic means.
Even if they never manage to decode one scrap of information from the stream (which I think is unlikely) they will have made an important discovery. That there is an inteligent species somewhere "out there" who are willing and able to put considerable effort into producing an attempt to communicate. It answers the question "Are we alone in the univers" by saying "There are geeks here". As commented by Terry Pratchett in "Interesting Times" simply communicating with no information at least tells you something.
In direct asnwer to some of your other points, Morse Code would be an extremely bad idea since it assumes the receiver understands English and that lived through the evolution of the human species. Language after all is very much routed in historical and cultural development.
This message was sent using a parabolic reflector which has the effect of amplifying the message compared to the background over a spatialy small area. Thus if the receivers are withing the area covered by the signal it will be much louder than anything else they pick up from us. It does depend on them listening at the correct frequency. However if they are already picking up spurious transmissions from us don't you think they would be listening. I'm sure we would be.
(\/)atthew
If *I* recall correctly, it was something to do with the spectrum emitted by hydrogen or something. Definately had to do with hydrogen.
If you take simplicity too far, understanding can be lost.
-Jason-
To the contrary, the odds are not very good at all that there is anyone close enough to talk to right now. The Earth is roughly 4600000000 years old. Humans as a technological species capable of generating/recieving interstellar message are only 50 years old. Assume the same percentages apply to the rest of the universe, factor in the speed of light, and you would be somewhat lucky to have ONE other species close enough to talk to in our galaxy even if every sun-like star in our galaxy has at least one planet with life.
Naeser's Law:
It teaches them part of our notation. I guess that's why they did it.
Now who's for pie?
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
It's not breaking the standard. But if I were to colour all my page elements in black with a black background this would be a bad thing, keh?
Just because it passes the W3 test don't mean it's all apple pie, or blueberry pie, for that matter.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
Hello, My name is Lord Braniac from the planet zoltron. Located in a galaxy very far away. I received your silly message from you stupid humans, and I can't even figure that damn thing out, even with my 349 I.Q. Have you humans ever heard of a thing called "English"?
Why not define run-length encoding after the first few pages, then start compressing the rest of the message?
Why not define colors after the explanation of waves and start using them in the message?
Why not define image resolution after that and include bit-mapped images of locations all around the earth?
- Marty
(Given the speed-of-light limitation, we won't have snappy conversation even if the other civilization is relatively close by.)What do we say? "Hi, were Humanity; here's as much of our understanding of the history of the universe as we've gotten so far; here's our understanding of physics and chemistry; here's how our biology works; here's the history of our species and the content of our various cultures." Does that about cover it? How many bytes do you estimate that breaks down to....a few Tb?I'd hate to be the guy who has to proofread everything.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
If we keep beaming weird looking crap like this into space, ET's are going to think we are a bunch of damn aliens.
~GoRK
"Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks and the last light of Durin's day will shine upon the keyhole."
--
Liberty uber alles.
They start out by defining a series of symbols and methodology of representing base 10 numbers and equality using a set of (apparently) arbitrary symbols, by displaying the base 1 and base 2 equivalents. This seems fair, though I'm not sure I would have bothered with base 10.
All mathematical symbols are arbitrary. There's nothing inherent about the symbol '=' that means equality. It is just a convention.
For the purposes of this message, the symbols are defined. The numerals are defined by cardinality of sets. Base-10 is used becuase it is more compact than Base 2 and it is the base that we use more often.
Similarly, the operators are defined on later pages. I haven't looked at the other pages in the message, but I would define + by referencing the special value 0, the identity element under addition. Multiplication is probably defined in terms of addition and exponentiation in terms of
Even if the aliens who receive and decode this message don't know about this particular prime, they might be able to determine its primality using similar methods to those used by us to do so. As such, the primality test of this number is a pretty big brag on our mathematical abilities.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
You forgot to consider the fact, that while we MIGHT kill ourselves off in a few years, it hasn't actually happened yet. It may never happen. However, even if it does, that doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be over and done with. Humanity may survive on a limited basis and over a few hundred or even thousands of years end up at the same point again (and may proceed to kill themselves all over again) Think Canticle of Leibowitz.
:)
Still, we have no statistical base to work from on this. To make an assumption based on current data, we have 1 civilization that has not managed to kill itself off, and 0 civilizations that have not. This means that there must be an infinite number of civilizations that have survived. (I realize until we have at least ONE civilization that HAS killed itself off, we won't be able to do a real comparison)
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
A couple of posts have touched on the content but I spent quite a bit of time looking at all the pictures before reading the commentary here.. It's really a quite interesting set of 'questions' to the intended recipient, I was a little giddy with myself for seeing the answer at the end (I guess this is the facet of my personality that makes me a programmer).
" >last page</a>, you'll notice a lot of the 'what-is' symbols next to all the symbols for our measurements of ourselves, along with a big what is symbol:
:)
:]
They start out with a simple definition of symbols, the symbol at the top of each page represents what 'state' of the transmission we are in, or what that pages info contains. The first symbol:
xxxxx
xx
x
x
x xxx
x x
x x
Represents an introduction, a primer, if you will. The most interesting symbol on those pages is the 'what is' symbol, shaped roughly like a flower. They introduce some simple math then use that symbol to make the following statements (I've drawn the what is symbol as a %):
%_ _+2=3 _=2
%_ _+4=10 _=6
and so on.. clear to see that the _ is an abstraction for 'x'. Later on down the page they use:
3
%x _=x
And they draw a picture of a cubic graph. The _ in this case is very similar to the x above, hinting that it is also a variable. In this case, y. I digress a bit. The most interesting symbol is the flower (what-is), for reasons I'll get to in a moment. In the sections that follow, we get information about ourselves:
xxxxx
xxx
x
x
xxx x
x x
xxxxx
Including that symbol on a picture of our solar system in the spot for earth, that symbol in a model of the earth and moon, that symbol with a various arrows to show which way we spin and how long that revolution takes, symbols for elevation, the highest and lowest points on the earth (-11000m and 8848m), our size (about 1.5m), common molecules that appear in nature (my chem is terrible so I couldn't decode these, but I'm assuming they are common carbon based molecules), a basic picture of a cell and dna replication, and a picture of our earth.
The best part though is that we introduced a new symbol for each of these 'measurements' with the 'we are' symbol I drew above. Paging through to the <a href="http://www.matessa.org/~mike/dutil/p23.html
x x x
xxxxx
xxxxx
x
xxxxx
x
x
... essentially asking, what are you? I got goosebumps, and I wait for the day where we get the incoming message with a symbol of their own introduced, for 'we are.'
cd
PS: gr, couldn't get the symbols to come out right, sorry. You'll have to look at the page.
Well.. why don't they just use *our* symbols, and teach ET that from the very beginning.
:>
Maybe it has something to do with export restrictions...
If you read on.. you'll see that the second page:m l
.since 'even' numbers can't be prime... and you can't get an odd number by multiplying or dividing from 2. (And yes i figured that out without lookin' at the solution, in answer to your question 'did anyone figure this out?')
.0001% of the population of earth even knows what this is heh... and only the brightest minds of the alien species will be decyphering this text. If they have the technology necessary to receive this message... then they MUST possess all the knowledge in this entire text.
http://pages.infinit.net/lachapel/seti/page2.ht
defines mathematical operators.
Nearly the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the 2 (superscript)3021377(/) ? 1 was.... its a power with an operation followed by one... and since this whole page was about defining prime #'s... it must be (the largest) prime we currently know of. So the ? was either + or -..
Anyways... if the alien's had figured this out right away is really not important... its just one part of a very very long and complex msg... hell.. page 8 introduces Hydrogen's spectra...
Chances are they don't hear the message.. if they do... they might not realize the static is a signal. Then they've got to put it into a viewable page format (for them)... and they probably don't use base 10 as their standard numerical base... oh the complications are endless =]
cheers,
ecc
That bugged me too. It was the only part that I couldn't easily figure out, although I did realize that the inner numbers were an exponent.
It's particularly frustrating when you consider that the whole point of "universal language" communications like these is to take advantage of features of our universe that any alien species would necessarily share with us. That's what the primes are for... any species with enough technology to recieve the message would recognize the significance of those numbers. But what does 2^3021377 - 1 mean to an alien species? Absolutely nothing.
MSK
Because assuming that space aliens understand English would be pathetically stupid?
Don't get me wrong, I mostly agree with the rest of your article. But if you take a fellow Earthling who can't speak English, doesn't know the Roman alphabet, and isn't aware of the truly fucked-up spelling rules we use, and send him a message in Morse, he isn't going to get it either.
Yet another consequence of speaking a language whose vocabulary came from German but whose grammar comes from Latin. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
"Yes sir we finally have confirmation, its a message full of swastikas. I'm afraid the Nazi party has taken over the world, begin the attack."
When we finally do make contact, their scientists, intellectuals, techheads and terminally ill are going to be seriously bummed out when they learn that of all the space aliens, they made contact with us: the race that came up with boy bands, electric nose hair trimmers, and beer dispensing hats.
Do them a favor. Encode a message that says "Sorry, Keep trying. Aim a bit more to the left next time."
"p.s. -- we apologize for any movies broadcast to you in the past, present, or future featuring professional basketball players. Especially Shaq. We are so so sorry about Shaq."
If some aliens got this pictore of squigles, comprehended it and sent back a response in similarly encoded squigles who would understand it ?
Erm... maybe it's just me, but how are you (or they :) supposed to know that the weird, second-last glyph is a minus sign, and what it's for?
Maybe I missed it, but I don't see it described anywhere.
Also, what is the glyph in the middle at the top for?
In a statement released earlier today, scientists stated that due to a clerical error, the message had been compiled with a missing page without which, none of the message would make any sense to any alien trying to decipher it. That lost message can be viewed here
Actually, I don't think the problem is proving primality, I should imagine that this wouldn't take more than an afternoon on a reasonably fast machine. The problem is finding them. If I say "x is prime" it's trivial to prove (or not) by factorisation, if I say "Find the next prime larger than x", you have a (potentially) big big search on your hands for large values of x (I believe you'll have to search about x values or so).
And as far as mathematical abilities go, it doesn't prove much. Only that we understand primes and that we have the ability to compute the factors of numbers on a speedy basis (which could be the domain of colonies of monks).
I would say that probably one of our biggest maths brags would be calculus, an abstraction of physical properties (not that there aren't more impressive maths feats but it's the first which starts to peel back the layers of the universe being "invented" to describe gravity as it was)
Rich
And if you've seen Superman, it's entirely possible that there's a guy from Krypton flying around upholding the law.
Rich
Is it just me, or does the image bear a shockingly uncanny resemblance to Space Invaders?
--
Such pictoral messages are unlikely to be very effective, if ever encountered by an alien intelligence; they are too human-centric and require way too many assumptions about visual acuity and pattern recognition and the ability to understand letters. Even people used to some languages on Earth would have great difficulty understand it. What's more, the actual transmission that was actually sent had typos in it! Nice job.
Raw transmissions such as Lincos like languages are largely mathematical, have no required geometrical interpretation to be understood, and are much more straightforward to decipher.
For an example of a Lincos-like language that was easily deciphered by amateurs, see The Contact Project. For an example of what Lincos "looks like" (it is actually a radio transmission, see Excerpts from Lincos. For more information on extraterrestrial intelligence and contact, see my Extraterrestrial intelligence links.
max
2 + 2 is 5 for very large values of 2.
You can't handle the truth.
Looking at the first 16 posts I am not convinced there is any intelligent life out there.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
If you do not agree with the terms of this licence, return the planet to the OEM you obtained it , or destroy the planet and any 'backup' copies you have. The abovementioned planet is for evaluation purposes only and will BECOME UNUSABLE after 30 days.
FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL LEAD BY AN INVASION OF HYPERAGRESSIVE HAIRLESS MONKEYS.
--Bill Gates. Emperor of Earth(tm)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I've always wondered, these messages that we send out are supposed to be simple enough for another civilization to decode once received; but what work goes into sending an easily recognizable message?
On SETI's page, they talk about a natural area of the radio spectrum where cosmic radiation does not interfere, and therefore this would be a good area to listen for communications which are meant for us to hear.
Are the messages we send out, also sent on this frequency? Has anybody ever taken a message such as this and analyzed the probability of a software program such as the one SETI uses recognizing it?
Do we take into account signal loss, and doppler effect when analyzing our own signals - to get a feel for how an alien race would analyze them were they to receive them in another galaxy?
Sure, we are definite they would receive the signal, but would they know it? By the time it reaches them, it may be full of static, or the timing may be too slow for a clear understanding of its intelligent origin; after all, if you were to scan a particular region of space, and for an entire day all you heard on a small frequency was a single strength of signal (a single pulse), you might be inclined to ignore it; believing it is regular noise from a distant cosmic event
I would like to know more about the science which goes in to the transmission of our own signals.
Ace
People are talking about posting more complicated messages to give instructions on building devices for communication.
In the least, this would show a need for communication between ourselves and another civilization; I believe it would be possible for 1 very simple reason.
The periodic table is as self-evident to an advanced culture as the number system, elements are formed in the table one after the other, and so with a little work we could send anything so long as we use diagrams.
I think it would be a great cosmic disaster to send plans for an atomic bomb to a race which has just mastered radio communications; what's more is, it would be very very funny.
Ace
Well, on the next few pages of the transmission, the explanations of +, -, and power notation are given. It would be difficult to comprehend that line without the rest of the message, definitely. Matt
Lets not assume if they receive this message it will be clear. Earth bound people have created a single paradigm for 'written' communication: 2 dimensional images on a flat surface. It is highly unlikely that another civilization uses this same paradigm. Consider: Who's to say that these Aliens wont use a system of arranging 3D rings of differnent colours to convey information. Whats to say they dont simply vomit on the floor and play with it with their appendages? Who says they have appendages? Maybe they blow smoke rings - or exhale globs of frozen methane which they then decorate their 'bodies' with to convey messages??? Who's to say they will have the faintest clue?
By the same logic; are they already sending messages to us? Maybe we are receiving/seeing them and are just so oblivious to their 'communication paradigm' that we dont even recognize it? Maybe the craters on the moon have been 'purposely built' to convey information to us? What about weather patterns? or the frequency of comets?
If these Aliens receive our message I find it very unlikely they will decifer it - they will try to apply the patterned info send in the radio waves to their paradim: and trust me; it wont look like that page of 'digits' we sent...
Do I think this is worthwhile? Absolutely! Its the only method we have - the reward is so great it is beyond imagination - the exploration/colonization of space should be the #1 priority of the planet, instead it seems we have chosen 'other' priorites (consumerism). Really a sad fate for us all - I just hope 250000 years from now 'we' have our priorities on this straight on this planet.
If the alien figures out a stream of 0's and 1's, how does he know that they represent 23 pages of 127*127 pixels?
Have you ever looked at a stack dump? I mean, even without being a programmer, you've seen them. But have you ever really looked at one?
When you start to see a pattern of, let's say, 65,535 random characters with a $ sign, then another 65,535 random characters and another dollar sign, can't you maybe make the assumption that you're dealing in 64k pages of information? If you then start to use the dollar sign as a sign to start a new line, then a pattern might become visible in the contents of the stack dump. (And, no, don't get highly technical on why this stack dump is wrong, it's an example.)
Each line that is being sent is 127 pixels long. At the same places in each string of seemingly random dots, there are pixels that mark the "edges" of the information.
Further, even Hellen Keller could see that there was intelligence at work if she saw this coming into the instruments on her radio telescope. It would be given close scrutiny.
Mathematics are universal. It doesn't matter if you write 2+2=4, or 0010 + 0010 = 0100, or even II + II = IV. The values and fundamentals are universal. If ET has 7 fingers on each hand, his numbering system might be base 7. But if he's got the technology to be building a radio telescope, he's got higher mathematics. And that means he's got the lowest and simplest mathematics there is: binary. And while there can be no standard way of writing the symbol between two lifeforms that have evolved completely different, it remains: There are two characters, On or Off. However you draw them.
Remember: 1001 = *..* = fyyf = etc.
If someone were to write this:
^^#^ + ^^## = ^#^#
And put it on a mathematician's desk, he'd figure it out in seconds.
Since they will know binary, and they'll know that another creature trying to make contact is likely to use it because of its simplicity, my bet is that they'll try to look for patterns on 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 ...and *128* in the incoming data stream. Right where our page edge markers are.
Build your own pay TV decoder for fun. You'll see that deciphering what appears to be random information really isn't all that tough. This is a walk in the park compared to some of the math that people get into in daily life. Let alone pure research scientists.
ET wouldn't have to be all that bright to figure it out. He *would* have to be far brighter to build the equipment with which to receive it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If this is the sort of thing that "intelligent" life broadcasts into space in an attempt to contact other civilisations, then it's no fucking wonder we've not yet got any evidence that we're not alone in the Universe.
[sigh]
Okay. How is time measured? In days, hours, minutes, seconds - right?
All stuff that's based on the properties of the orbit of our planet. A planet that they've never seen before, and until this message, have no idea where it is.
Their planet may spin slower than ours. What we measure as a second here may well actually take 34 of our seconds on their planet.
What's that mean? It means that when we try to describe basic properties of distance in our units of measurement - like light years, for example - their light years would end up being different from ours. Essentially, then, they'd receive a message that displays intelligence, but demands that they use references that they don't have.
What's the distance between the Earth and Sun? Going to measure that in kilometers and send it to them? How do you describe a kilometer over radio waves? You can't send a reference unit of 1m, you know. You can't tell them it's approximately the length of the recipient's left arm. What if the reader has tentacles?
*Everything* has to be defined clearly in a mathematical sense. Anything that isn't probably won't have a reference that they can understand.
Sending them video of Three's Company or something would tell them a lot about us. An NTSC TV signal is repetitive and therefore could be quite easily dissected and displayed by an alien culture. But what would Three's Company say about us or our world? And how many minutes of Jack whining could you get to fit in under 64k of highly noise-resistant signal?
So, with this new understanding, what do *you* propose is a better way to get in touch with ET? What do *you* suggest will tell him the most about us?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's not as if radio antennas are limited to one frequency (or even any finite number of frequencies) at one time. Perhaps you've heard of Fourier transform?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
when they are probably too busy trying to decipher the meaning of all the Leave it to Beaver episodes.
http://www.matessa.org/~mike/dutil/p8.html
.
"And this, Mr Alien, shows you just how memory intesive Windows is..."
~matt~
0
o
><>
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Couldn't find it after a few minutes' googling, so perhaps some of the UFO nuts out there could provide a link or a refutation ....
GUINEAPIG
I sat down with pen, paper, and a calculator, and figured it out, using my extrodonary mental powers. It says "first post". :)
We as humans believe we have come a long way in science and technology. Yet our own SETI program is simply looking for any simple artificial signal that has a clue intelligent life. Since that is what we are looking for shouln't we be sending that type of signal. A very simple short and repetative signal. Instead many seem set on sending math equations and DNA sequences that may otherwise be missed by other worlds simply looking for a just simple sign of life. Instead they keep trying to send the Libray of Congress. It would thing It would be more effective to send a simple straight forward repeating signal such as a rising and falling tone followed by a short beep. Kind of like a FAX carrir signal. Just let them know we are listening.
Two Towers-Two Worlds.One seeks triumphs and freedom for man.The other deems man unworthy and wrecks them.
Not those damn earthlings again! dump 'em in the bit bucket and block all future messages. Stupid kindergarten drivel !!!! Stupid earth trolls. Fuck em.
The alien reply will be:
"Attention all planets of the solar federation.
Attention all planets of the solar federation.
Attention all planets of the solar federation.
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control.
We have assumed control."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If they already know this prime it's be pretty easy; especially if they had anything like 'IT'. I tried a google search on 3,021,377 and in turned up lots of stuff about (2 ^ 3,021,377) - 1.
If they don't know this prime already and don't know about Mersenne primes, it's going to be pretty tricky, but they may be able to figure it out given that they can decode later parts of the message. Maybe they'll start looking into Mersenne primes if they didn't know them already.
I think encoding some non-obvious data is a really interesting idea. Sure, start with the lowest primes, but once you get past 13 or so you're just wasting space -- they're sure to have figured it out and if they haven't its hopeless. BUT -- when the first alien geek figures this out, there is going to be a moment of "aha" -- a meeting of minds across interstellar space.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
They must have used windows to make this.
I'm getting an extra ^M at the end of each line. This is sure to cause "stair stepping," as any superior alien race is sure to be using UNIX.
-Peter
The linked page is the first of 23 such images that made up the complete transmitted image. Here's a list of all of them.
--
- Mathematical concepts including Pi and the Pythagorean Theorem
- Our solar system, and our place in it
- Typical Earth geography
- Molecules
- Cells and DNA
- Pangaea
- Partially-split continents
- Communications
A lot of thought obviously went into the preparation of the complete message. My hat's off to the team that came up with it!--
My bad: these two images are two halves of one image (indicated by the alignment marks on the right-hand side of 19 and the left-hand side of 20) and depict Earth's continents in today's layout, but with an East-Up layout that confused me at first.
--
I am surprised that this sort message has not been sent out many, many times already. But, after reading the links, it appears that this is the longest message and the first since 1974. (Correct me if I am wrong here.) It would seem that the chance would be vanishingly small that any alien intelligence will intercept this message as it would require a series of increasingly improbable events. To see why, consider what is needed for successful reception (ingoring the possibility for successful message interpretation): (1) An alien intelligence; (2) an alien intelligence in at least one target location; (3) an alien intelligence in at least one target location that will have a 1 km^2 radio anntenna array; (4) an alien intelligence in at least one target location that will have a 1 km^2 radio anntenna array and will have detectors tuned to 5 GHz; (5) an alien intelligence in at least one target location that will have a 1 km^2 radio anntenna array and will have detectors tuned to 5 GHz and will be analyzing signals originating from our region; (6) an alien intelligence in at least one target location that will have a 1 km^2 radio anntenna array and will have detectors tuned to 5 GHz and will be analyzing signals originating from our region for one of 60 of a possible 180 minutes sometime within the next 70-100 years. Now, being intelligent ourselves and seriously hoping that this far-fetched scheme works, why are we not sending these messages out more frequently? Was the message SETI is hoping to recieve sent out 20 (or even 20 million) years ago?
Anyway, a Hebrew or Arabic puzzle would have just been a mirror image I guess. And I am sure this puzzle will get distorted on transit by not being in the ET's network byte order.
It's amazing just how difficult it is to describe things that you and I (and all people) take for granted.
Like describing temperature. You can't give it in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit - those measurements evolved on Earth. They're referenced to things on Earth.
You can't even give it in degrees Kelvin, because their scientific scale could well be based on something completely different. From absolute zero to the temperature of a sunny day on their planet?
So, you have to define an atom. Then, you have to define a few basic elements. And then the compound H2O, which still has the same atomic composition, though instead of calling it water, they'll recognize it as something they call NNGrlap. They love to ride down NNGrlap slides on days when their planet's star shines brightly on the land. And, on the remotest of possibilities that they've never seen water - under any name - they'll figure out how to make it. If they have the ability to make a radio telescope, they understand enough chemistry to know that hydrogen and oxygen react together. So, even if oxygen is a rarer-than-palladium element to them, at least their scientists will have seen it, documented its properties, and will be able to make water so that they can understand our standard.
It's more likely, though, that ET will simply slither (or whatever) down the hallway, and turn on the faucet in the office kitchen to get a beaker full of NNGrlap.
Once ET is familiar with the basic properties of NNGrlap/Water, you can establish a descriptive and meaningful temperature measurement of things that only we have seen.
The fact that every measurement has to be described and that whatever the recipient's language is, it's going to be far different from *anything* we know on this planet, means all communication must be mathematics.
Like reading graffiti in Aramaic, you don't need to know anything about Aramaic to know that the patterns on the wall aren't by accident. But, unless you've had some expose to the culture, you won't be able to make sense of it on your own. They'll have had no experience to our cultures. Therefore, any human language is not useful.
Not to mention the fact that it could well take 1,000 years for the message to travel to a planet and be read by someone, and another 1,000 years for it to come back. What did English sound like 2,000 years ago? Didn't exist? Who is to say that it will still exist 500 years from now, let alone 2,000? So, if they managed to decipher a human-language message, and reply to it, our decendents will probably have a tough time understanding it. Ever read Beowulf? (Not the cluster, the old English poem). Think Shakespeare was tough? Try Beowulf. And that's only 1,000 years old.
In mathematics, 2+2=4, no matter how you write it. If they've got the technology to receive a signal from space, they've got mathematics. They'll be able to figure out the message.
Consider the ground that was covered in that message. We defined *everything* in 23 pages of low-resolution dots. We described DNA. Maybe in a galaxy far, far away, the project manager of the radio telecope is going to be standing at an NNGrlap cooler, chatting with a fellow employee, when a scientist will come running in, show him the page, and he'll drop his glass of NNGrlap with surprise at how they're based on the same basic DNA structure as we are.
We covered the spectral responses of our senses of sight and hearing. That will be important if they ever follow the directions we gave them and come to visit us. It'd be tough if they communicated in ultrasonics... :)
All this ground was covered. And anyone, regardless of language, with some scientific interest, could figure it out.
Mathematics is the only universal language. Not that it's practical for conversation...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
maybe they know what 'IT' is!
CRYPTIC ALIEN MESSAGE 2.0
What's New:
- Updated largest prime.
- Added new page with my world (now galaxy) famous chocolate cookie recipie.
- Removed Iraq from world map just to be a jerk, but may return in a future patch...
BytesTemplar.com
Holy Cow,
this is almost plaintext in the Furth language, just shifted 13 places in the alphabet.
The message reads:
Greetings Furths,
The race of humans has just learnt of your existance, after polluting our own planet, strip-mined it and centuries of brutal war with machines of devastating descruction, we finally found your planet.
Please prepare for our resource probe fleet, due to land in 378 years (203 Furth years).
Looking forward to meeting you.
- The Eartlings
--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Unless I missed something, I disagree with their method of denoting the "largest prime found so far"...
They start out by defining a series of symbols and methodology of representing base 10 numbers and equality using a set of (apparently) arbitrary symbols, by displaying the base 1 and base 2 equivalents. This seems fair, though I'm not sure I would have bothered with base 10.
They then include the first 24 prime numbers using the notation introduced above, which seems good.
Then suddenly they jump to including something that the decoded as:
3021377
2 ?1
with the "?" being a symbol that was not included anywhere else on the first page. This caused me quite a bit of confusion... especially the unknown symbol. I was beginning to think they had made a typo, or that it was one of the number symbols garbled. It looked more similar to the number symbols than the equality symbol, so I assumed that it was a number or letter, not a non-number symbol, such as a arithmetic operation or decimal point.
The number itself didn't seem to give any hints either... I was assuming that it was going to be something like pi or the natural log of 10... but the number wasn't familiar.
Turns out they intended this to mean 2**3021377 - 1, which they claim is the largest prime found at the time this was written.
This seems unnecessarily confusing for some poor alien trying to figure it out. In one step, they introduce a new symbol (without any context), indicating substraction, a method of denoting exponents (without introducing exponents), all to describe a number that provides someone trying to decode it no clue as to what the new symbol and new denotation mean.
Did anyone else figure out the "largest prime" on their own? Is there some other clue that I missed?
-- Scott