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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.
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
> And what's the whole idea with using pictures anyway? Before the aliens even get to figuring out how to interpret/understand it, they've got to get displaying it right
The real tragedy is that it was received on Achernar VII, where the symbol for "=" looks like their 2/3males, the symbol for "1" looks like their 2/3females, and the symbol for "2" looks like their 1/3male1/3females, and the combination "=12" at the middle right, which uses those three symbols, looks like a carnal conjunctive configuration that is not approved by their majority religion. Worse, if they count to 12 on their fingers it leaves the hand in the shape of an obscene jesture.
We are now at war with the Achernar VIIlings. Their High Thwip has ordained 3.26 fippur lashings for every citizen of the planet that sent the foul message, as soon as his god teleports us there so he can administer them.
May our own gods postpone that day: they're really going to be offended if they discover that we don't have fippurs to receive the lashings on!
--
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
With light impacting a 3d object, you get a surface, patterns on that surface will be "2d" information and for any image processing organ (eye) worth its salt, will be projected onto a "2d" receptor (shadows, facial markings, body language).
It's a fair bet (though by no means certain) that any species capable of using visual communication media will use something "2d". Of course, that's not to say they won't use others, we do ourselves after all (sculptures etc).
Note that I use "2d" not in its strictly correct definition to make my point
Rich
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