Slashdot Mirror
Search for Terrestrial Intelligence
joshv writes: "Scientists have prepared a new message to be beamed out to the stars. Unlike the messages of the past this one tries to include some basic resistance to the noise that might be introduced in transit. The CETI project page contains a link to the new message. It a big bag of 0's and 1's. About 10% noise has been added. Can you crack the code? Details of the project as well as an interview with the one of the creators of the new message can be found in this New Scientist article. A hint to decoding: think simple raster based images and remember your powers of 2." Might want to get your copy of Beyond Contact or at least look at the first message they sent.
I got it on the first try: All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
We all knew there's no intelligent life on earth, what I want to know is there any in outer space!
Reid
I like teamwork. It's easier to assign blame that way.
No wonder no one responded!
Perhaps they'll have better luck with plain text.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Look, they can only count to 1! Zarqblast, how do you think they made it to radio's with only 0 and 1's?
What about these people? They had the idea a long time ago...
Everything is mainstream now.
For the first person who puts that sucker through a perl script and translates it to ASCII
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
As if the type of message we send is relevent...If 'they' are advanced enough to recieve and translate a message of ours, making it with less noise, this language or that language, is for naught. Either someone/thing gets the message, or they do not. There is no in between.
The message should read :
Have you seen Bin Ladden??? If so, please contact us at :
Federal Bureau of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20535-0001
(202) 324-3000
they didn't include directions on how to build the massive transporter device, so an alien civilization can send one of their foremost extraterrestrial researchers to earth to meet her deceased father in a hallucinated dream-world.
Dunno who wrote this, but this story reminded me of it:
----
Imagine if you will... the leader of the fifth invader force speaking to the commander in chief...
"They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
"Meat?"
"There's no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."
"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars."
"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat."
"Maybe they're like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."
"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take too long. Do you have any idea the life span of meat?"
"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."
"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through." "No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
"So... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Finally, Yes. They are indeed made out meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"So what does the meat have in mind?" "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat?"
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there? Anyone home?' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in the quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say?" `Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend there's no one home in the universe."
"That's it."
"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed? You're sure they won't remember?"
"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."
"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."
"And we can mark this sector unoccupied."
"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"
"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."
"They always come around."
"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone."
Terrestrial Intelligence? Well it's obviously not here!
seem to have an irresistible urge to "invent" a new numbering system with space-invader-like digits every time they send a message. What will space aliens think if they receive more than one message? Base-10 left-to-right 0123456789 digits aren't that bad, and have the benefit that an alien reply using our numerals will be understandable by all earthlings directly.
Well, if you're looking for terrestrial Intelligence as the headline to this article says, you're looking in the wrong place!
i think da subject says all ;)
and wrap it around the space shuttle, you get the Pepsi Logo.
Hope they haven't been waiting on chapter 2 of the first message..., "Damn Orgloff, no more pictures!"
May as well beam up my calculus III book, they'd probably have better luck...
I gave myself to Jesus, but now he never calls
Sheeeesh, why don't they make it more obvious, not something that has to be "cracked"?
:-), and then raster images of what they want to communicate, repeating over and over.
:-)
/. because of that?)
Like a regular sequence of on/off that just can't be missed (your "start bits" that get noticed
"Hey, look at this regular pattern of signal! That's weird. And it's interspersed with these garbage; if we just kind of line it up in rows, look, images!" (Assuming the concept of images means anything to whatever intelligence comes across it
(Of course, I might be way off base, as I didn't read the article. Will I get kicked off
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This reminds me of some story from the beginnings of SETI back in the late 60's or early 70's; some big-wig scientist brought a message to the table and said "this is what we should send to ET." All the other big-wig scientists spent a while looking it over and finally said "we give, what does it mean?" The first big-wig explained that it was a message which made no cultural or biological assumptions about the listener, and was based on resonant frequencies of hydrogen and such, etc. All the scientists agreed that it was a very good message to send to ET, but the fact remains that some of the world's finest scientific minds could not figure out what it meant.
So, if we require a hint to figure this message out ourselves, what makes us think ET won't just ignore it as a random burst of static?
This presumably is if they havent got our radio and television signals that we have been sending into space for the last 100years and have a concept of "digital" or even language, look how much english has changed in 2000 years.
the more i read this the more i think it is merely some bored students thesis project to get their degree more than a serious scientific project
Ok, we as the arrogant humans that we are are assuming that aliens not only can understand our language (english, french, german, or whatever) but also that they use and will interperite the binary system. If we want to contact other races why not send out the most unnatural most interfering em (electro magnetic) noise we can. Make it far reaching. Send out probes that only send out the most destrubing noise we can muster. This would most likely provoke attention and cause the finder to look for a source of this disruptive noise.
I was wondering how SETI would be expecting to receive a signal if we didn't even send one ourselves.
Can we get a program to see the output in SETI@home? Maybe it'll at least give us a hint as to the encoded message.
Just by coincidence, I was hearing radio ads today for Lily Tomlin's play "Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" which she's doing here in San Francisco. Terrestrial intelligence being in such short supply, perhaps she can help...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's by Terry Bisson. He's aware that it's circulating the Internet unattrubuted, but fortunately it seems he doesn't have a problem with it.
And the brethren went away edified.
Or perhaps they transmitted DeCSS source code so some intelligent life may make use of it...
How do we know whether the aliens use big or little endian??
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
--- BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE ---
:-)
1010 101:
10001010110101011011100100. 1010100000100101010?00101001011101 "0101011010101101101010" 101010... 101101010100101010010100010100/.1010010100131337. 001001101010ph34r. 10111001010id41000101110. 1010010101011100101111111001010010010100
11010000100101011011101010010110000!!! 11001010111101000101000011100. 10101011000001101010101010101010010101
1101011101,
110111
--- END PGP SIGNED MESSAGE ---
Visit our website at http://www.yahoo.com/~cthulhu
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number. How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Hi, we're the humans, look at all the cool scientifical data we got!
a/s/l?
OK, so it's intended as humor, but it really *is* relevant to deciding what kinds of messages to send to Extra Terrestrials. Maybe they're not made of meat.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I decoded the image and here it is! Those damn scientologists were right! This just proves my theory that the reason all those powerful folks become scientologists because they have actually spoken to Xenu! This "Search for Terrestrial Intelligence" is really just another scientologist ploy to get other alien races to follow the wisdom of Xenu!
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Since slashdot will lameness filter out the asterisks in it, heres a perl script to decode it (sorry about the crap code):
/g;
:-(
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
my($out) = "";
while()
{
chop;
s/1/*/g;
s/0/\
$out = $out . $_;
}
# Remove first 69
$out = substr($out,69);
$rowlength = 127;
my($nextrow) = "";
do
{
$nextrow = substr $out, 0, $rowlength;
print $nextrow . "\n";
$out = substr $out, $rowlength;
}
while($out ne "");
exit;
The output wont go through lameness filter
But its here anyway.
Mr Thinly Sliced
I'm not sure what this would really prove. I mean, sure, it would be nice to know that a human could decode the signal, but does that show that aliens (if they exist) could do it? For example, it might be obvious to us to try formatting the data as a raster image, but why is this necessarily an obvious thing for an alien to try? It's obvious to us because we're in a culture that transmits 2D images around the place a lot, but is that necessarily a safe assumption about the aliens?
Yes, it's true. I've figured out what the message they've sent is! It's 0 and 1 a whole bunch of times! Lots and lots of 0's. And 1's. Over and over again. ;-)
If you need to interpret my post, then you don't get it.
I still think the most interesting approach to extraterrestrial exploration is to use a fleet of autonomous probes. One such design I'm most partial to is a simple payload cylinder with a solar-sail affixed. If the sail is physical, then build in some radiation shielding. If it's electromagnetic as some physicists have suggested, then your shielding may be unnecessary. Inside, the payload consists of a rack of fertilized cells in stasis, and variously encoded data about our society. Use a long-term radiothermal battery to power it, and launch as many off as we can, in various directions. Make it strong enough to survive the ages and eventually, assuming there is other intelligent life out there, one will eventually be encountered. Furthermore, if we include our own cells, these things could serve as modern day arks. Build them using old missile chassis and we've killed three birds with one stone.
Pax Digitalia
This story is not complete without a link to the wonderful Contact Project: http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/alien.html Much more interesting to try to figure out an alien civilization -- this message is really well done!
-Lars
The aliens had trouble translating our message and read it as :
all your base are belong to us
we have already found aliens, they are Amiga users.
...working out what the heck the image means is much harder.
:-)
(getting the image took me about 10 mins in emacs)
I understand the pictures
Looking at their paper, I guess the rest of it is explaining mathmatical principles and stuff like that.
.. flushing money down the crapper on beaming information out into space. this is tantamount to cramming LPs into a spacecraft and flinging it to the far reaches of the universe. so, 10,000 years from now, when we've all been dead 9,900 years from nuclear holocaust, some race of beings will just be getting this signal.
percentage of noise regardless.. this approach to contacting distant civilizations is totally lame. we're taking information loaded with earth-centric logic and counting on someone (or something) else to 1.) pick up the information 2.) have any idea what it is or what to do with it 3.) care enough to do anything about it.
Our relations will depend entirely upon a) how well armed they are and b) how good they taste with ketchup.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Well, actually, right now there's also '\n's.
Which actually gives us a hint on where to start with decoding: there's an obvious pattern, however, the length chosen for the lines is not identical to the pattern.
In other words, first thing to do is rearranging the line lenghts to match the pattern.
If I take the random piece:
00001000000001100000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000110000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000011000000000000110011
00100010001001010010001000100000001010000
00000000000011000100110000001000000101001
00100001000100001100000000100000000000011
00010000000001010010010101010010000001100
I would rearrange it as:
00001000000001100000000000000000000000000*
00000000000001100000000000000000000000000*
00000000000001100000000000011001100100010*
00001100000000100000000000011000100000000*
(*end of line cut due to lameness filter)
The noise is obvious from the fourth line. It becomes a bit trick if you get noise in the time-domain, but still nothing to complex. It certainly looks like they use a fixed 'word' length.
#!/usr/bin/perl /;
.= $_;
open(TXT,"message.txt");
while(<TXT>){
s/\n|\r//g;
tr/0/
tr/1/*/;
$string
if(!$test && length($string) > 127){
$string =~ s/^.*(\*\*)/$1/;
$test = 1;
}
next if length($string)< 127;
print substr($string,0,127,undef),"\n";
}
print $string;
I can't figure out what language it's in though. Those characters are weird. I'm guessing that the mathematical notation, besides using weird characters, is pretty like what we're used to. In that case I think I can also make out A=pi*2^2 and C=2*pi*r next to a picture of a circle.
-- SIGFPE
Hey, Shoulden't that be Extra Terrestrial Intelligence?
Or mabey they really haven't found any on Earth ...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
I mean, I speak english, I live on earth, and the pictures by themselves are meaningless to me.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Fun-loving bipedal species with reasonable sense of humor seeks intelligent alien race for meaningful exchange. Must not have too much hair or too many legs. Not willing to serve as breeding stock. Brain-eaters need not apply.
My question is about "the first message". I mean, they do not look "simple". Braille and other symbols are simpler. Actually Arabic numerals and operands are visually simpler. Anyone know why they chose the symbols that they chose?
Lets just hope the message is not "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" because either they will not respond, come attack us, respond with "YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE, MAKE YOUR TIME," or make another response with "Dude, we have known that quote for EONS."
Of course, making sense out of the resulting image could take a while. At the top they're counting in binary, and seem to be assigning an arbitrary symbol for each number. The symbols seem to have been chosen in an attempt to make them out even when partially garbled. Those symbols and certain pictures are then used throughout the rest of the image. Heh, and check out the naked ppl!
cat output_stream.txt | tr 1 Z | tr 0 0 | rawtopgm 127 2000 > k.pgm && gimp k.pgm
Doesn't remove the noise.
Load text into a hex editor and replace the 0x0D 0x0A with nothing (XVI32 works well) then replace the 0x48 with 0x01 and the 0x49 with 0xFE.
Open up a graphics program that allows you to load RAW files (Paint Shop Pro worked for me). Load the file and set the width as 127 and the height as 2149. Presto! You got yourself a pretty looking graphic.
sorry, im not gonna decript this thing but with my (very small) knowledge of binary, wouldnt the decription of this message by an alien intelagence require them to not only have an understanding of how we use the binary system, along with an understanding of how we translate those results into our language? wouldnt it make more sence to send a message such as this with a "rosetta stone" of sorts, so who/whatever recieves this message might have some clue as to just what the hell it is?
well, thats my 2 cents! hope someone postes a translation!
Go to the message page, and scroll down by holding down the 'Page Down' key. You start to see a kind of diagonal line moving from right to left over the numbers.
No sig for you.
We sent the equiliviant of the IRC message....
A/S/L?
Supries that the planet hasn't been kick/banned already.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm sorry, but to me, crop circles have to be proof of something. A recent investigation of the absolutely breathtaking Milk Hill incident showed that it could not have been created by humans on the ground without several days' work and heavy plowing equipment -- but the pattern appeared overnight, without disturbing any nearby residents. And it's so geometrically perfect! If it isn't ET, than someone is having some fun with an orbitting laser a la Ed in Cowboy Bebop.
Cool stuff!
--
I like to watch.
"Hi, I send you this message in order to have your advice..."
Is it really prudent to be advertising our location like this? Why is it always assumed that any alien civilization that hears a message from us would want to be our friends?
I've got it partly deciphered.
It starts: "Make Money Fast!"
I'll work on the rest tommorrow.
Trolling is a art,
You've given them a blueprint of how to destroy the Earth. I hope you are happy.
I decoded the message, and that's what I got -- nasty!
I just realized something... what if those aliens were circumventing our copyrights on media thats transmitted by radio waves?!? (radio and some TV) to think that they could be listening to our music without paying for it...
I guess we should hook up transmitters and beam all of our DVD's and MP3's into space
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
...Be quiet!
"I have a cunning plan..."
Maybe we'll get lucky and that big silver law-enforcement robot thing will vaporize their lawyers.
The 42 character line length is a little misleading. It appears to be a 64 bit wide binary image.
If you open the file in a hex editor and get rid of all the line breaks, and replace the 1s with a hex value of FF, and the 0's with a hex value of 0, then open it as a raw image with a width of 64 in Photoshop, you can see the image.
I didn't quite get it right, the image is shifted one pixel per line. But it looks like it contains a picture of earth, and some human figures, among other things.
I just hope the aliens have Photoshop.
They can just copy and paste it into Microsoft Windows NotePad, turn word-wrapping on, and resize the window until it makes a recognisable image.
OTOH, they will be pissed off when it takes fifty years to transmit a one year subscription key for their new version of Windows from Earth.
I think a good message to send would be "All your base are belong to us" We would find out if they had a sense of humour or not.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
...take a look at the Drake equation. It makes a hell of a lot more sense then your argument.
Here is the Drake equation from the google cache.
"And like that
"Decryption of this message is prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of the United States of America of Planet Earth of the Sol system in the Milky Way Galaxy, and is punishable by a fine of 1,000,000 credits, or disintegration, or both."
P.S. Who wants to take a stab at Microsoft on this?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
W3 4rE l33t dOodZ 0f 34r7h!!! W0rd!!!
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
...that the FBI would announce Magic Lantern, and two weeks later SETI releases an "improved" version of its message.
It says: "where do you want to go today?"
OMG i've got it! It's a picture of the tall black monolith off 2001!
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Can someone submit a patch, please? We don't want ET to think we're complete retards.
Didja notice the map in the decoded message is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map Projection of Earth? Nifty cool. Also, there's a marking on the map over what appears to be Siberia. The location of the transmitter, perhaps?
"Luck is the residue of design" --Branch Rickey
Cheap alternative to missile shield.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
As so many others have pointed out... how the heck are these aliens supposed to actually get anything meaningful out of this? Assuming they even notice this transmission (forget whether or not they EXIST..), why is it supposed to occur to them that this is a 2-dimensional image? That it is exactly 127 pixels wide? (Yes I noticed the bars down the sides. That's barely even useful, if you know nothing about the incoming signal whatsoever.) That what they see has any meaning at all? Why wouldn't they first assume it to be a serialized language, or a soundclip, or......? I suppose the important thing is that there is a transmission at all, which will say "Hey, somebody out there is broadcasting!" But seriously. If I saw some 5x5 pixel bitmap floating across my holodeck, do you think I'd have any CLUE what it was? As others pointed out.. I'm human. I speak English. And I can't make out squat on that thing! Alright.. I just won't question it. Clearly I don't get this whole SETI thing...
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
I have to go back and look on that cosmology page. Question is, Why not include information on where Earth is? Is that possible? How about triangulation (er, quadrangulation) to pulsars or stars or somesuch?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
So now we need a project wherein a message will be sent that those other earthlings sending messages are glue huffing 'tards and not to pay any attention to them. Think they'll buy it?
[blow]
How to cook
[blow]
How to cook humans
[blow]
How to cook for humans
[blow]
How to cook forty humans
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I think we've just been insulted.
Great, now aliens are gonna come here and expect to see everyone walking around naked and waving. Boy won't they be surprised if they land in the middle of a San Francisco Gay Pride Parade!
them message say:
"Help! We the Earth-race is being suppressed by an evil entity known as Microsoft, its destroying our entire civilization."
Except that I can cross from A to B. QED.
This is much the same sort of silly nonsense.
I figure that alien life probably doesn't exist--but I don't resort to silly arguments to `prove' it.
Given that, the odds seem reasonable that any civilization that spots us has likely got more advanced technology (at least in terms of radio astronomy) than us, and has probably been around for a lot longer.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Ok, I'm looking at that, and here's what I see in it.
a. first frame
1. first off, there is the sequance oooxxxxxoxo which is binary for either 1797, 250, 760 or 1287, depending on binary notation, this doesn't mean anything to me.
2. Basic counting. A number of boxes, a symbol, a binary expression of the number where most signifigant digit is first, x = 1 and o = 0 then the symbol again, then a symbol wich appears to represent the value.
3. when you get to 10, there's the number symbol, the 1 symbol and a 0 symbol. 11 is number symbol, 1 symbol, 1 symbol and so on, skiping a few. at 20 we have number symbol, 2 symbol, 0 symbol.
next is a bunch of value symbols. what i can make out is 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83,87
primes, other then 15, person making this must've messed up.
then ooooxxxxoxo binary for 122
this frame is clearly teaching aliens how we count.
The arguments do look strikingly similar...
-LaoTze
I don't think NASA is sending the right message. I hope any civilizations don't figure this out, because if they do, I don't think they'll be on friendly terms when they come to visit us. The message contains detailed information on human anatomy..
:(
I decoded the message and got:
http://www.mattevans.org/nasa_message.html
warning: this isn't a link, because the message we're sending isn't a good one. View at your own risk. You may be ashamed of the scientific community
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I've seen the blocky png and gifs, but can anyone get it fine enough to read it?
Or is the blocky version the best thing and aliens would be looking at huge pixels?
eh...
A/S/L = Age/Sex/Location
I had to look it up(not all of us are owlish dorks people;))
OK...this is great and stuff, but if I detected the ones and zeroes on my radio telescope, and wasn't particularly interested in intelligence, I don't think I'd bother to look. We seem to be making a LOT of assumptions.
..
...
.....
.......
..........
.............
Why not send out a much simpler message: the first N primes in unary.
What I mean is (imagine each dot as a flash of light, delimited by a pause)
2
3
5
7
11
13
and so on. No number system convesions, no pictures cryptic even to our own race. Something you'd recognize as intelligent if you were out stargazing one night.
Besides, what if it's a devolved civilization that's using our equivalent of MFC and Java, instead of Perl? How would they hack the script to decode the message???
they used Buckminster Fuller's map. he made the first (and only, i belive) map to show the earth without any distortion of the continents.
its all cut up and the things are in odd places, but thats cool that they used his map.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
If an alien civilization received this, would they get an Outlook virus from it?
I sure hope that "the message" is written a hell of a lot better than the embarassing english prose in their description of it.
As an aside, they describe the dots beside the naked man and woman as: "The dotted line on the left side, give (sic) a representation of Up (sic) and Down (sic). It is ballistic trajectory, showing clearly where the gravity goes (sic)." They should have just drawn the woman a little older, so the aliens could just look at her wrinkled breasts to see where the gravity goes!
It all goes downhill from first post
how is this "funny"?? It's standard goatse trolling....
1) Did you notice that near the end of the message there's a map, and a weird symbol right over China?
This seems a little suspicious. Are they suggesting that the aliens dump their weapons or land their ship in China?
2) The people in the picture have no pubic hair, and the guy has a small wang.
3) Both Earth and Jupiter are marked on the map. Why Jupiter? Is this a 2001 thing? Is Jupiter going to turn into a second sun as predicted by Arthur C Clarke?
4) Why does this message look like the average instruction manual you get with motherboards nowadays?
mogorific carpentry experiments
etc.
Actually the odds are at least roughly similar to the collections of civilizations that we have had here on earth at any random period of time for the history of the species. Say the past ten thousand to fifty thousand years. Select a bunch of random samples, times and locations (ten square Km or mile areas), and see what you get.
the odds may be comparable. and are at least based a bit on reality.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've seen this picture before. It isn't in any language; they're defining the characters as they go along. The characters are chosen to be distinguishable even with lots of noise.
They start with O = 0 and X = 1 to express binary numbers, and then use those to define digit characters. They go on to define other things with those digits.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
The first time I read it I thought, "y'know, this would explain a lot.
Don't tell me how many things are wrong with the code, I just needed to visualize that thing scrolling!
F0 07 C7 C8
Look, Xebgor! A map! Ooooh! And look at that tasty chemistry!
Got any plans for the weekend, or you wanna go conquer some idots?
And the message of course is:
"Good evening gentlemen. All your base are belong to us!"
I can just see our Alien friends landing in Farmer Joe's field and approaching him with a message written in what they think is our language...Boy is he going to be confused.
It may be me, but my one year old son has books that explains numbers in a far easier way. Maybe we should transmit that instead!
I wonder if you got a map of the stars, rated a star as a one, and empty space as a zero and opened up the text map you ended up with spacing at various widths (127, 255,1023,2047,4095, etc..) if you would find some deity graffiti? Something along the lines of: j00 r 0\/\/N3|> - 60|> .
Someone should check it out. I think if you take the stars (spaced at 80) that make up orion you get "B33r is gooD!".
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
Denial of the fact that in all likelihood there is no one out there, and if there is, we will not be able to contact them, and if we do receive their messages, we will not be able to understand them.
Why this obsession with talking to aliens? Why do we not try talking... to each other? It seems we have finally given up hope of communicating with our fellow human beings? We have finally relented to the hatred that has left a trail of the dead through Israel, Yugoslavia, New York City. We instead turn our eyes to the sky, where God once was, hoping for a kind word from above, hoping that as-yet-undiscovered intellects from across the stars will provide the answers we have failed to find within ourselves.
We hope in vain.
No, it says:
Three for the elves
seven for the dwarves
nine for the men
one ring to rule them all...
you know the rest
n/t = That's a clue.
do we really want to be announcing our presence to the cosmos?
Geeks, there's even a nude woman in it. Starts at about offset 176910 (print the columns with 127 bits per line).
On the other hand, by placing a well-built Ken beneath her, at least we show to aliens that we know about the basic principles of heterosexuality.
I wonder if they will send the signal 24 hours a day into the sky or only after 11pm to give German government a chance to protect our poor children from smut like this.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
From http://www.perlstorm.net/message.gif
In the apparent sketch of the earth, under South America.......
Why, it's a rubber ducky! I can see why they put it there; everyone knows your never alone when you have a rubber ducky, even aliens.
Robort knows all.
This is just THIS MESSAGE encoded differently. I downloaded this about 9 months ago from a more obscure site. I wouldn't call it "new" given that age. The message in jpg form will be difficult for some to decipher, doubtless. They should at least update the Mersenne prime.
Wouldn't it have been better to set the length at the product of two primes? That way there'd only be one possible way of interpretting it, and any species without factorisation isn't worth contacting :
Hmmm....50 or 60 years outgoing, maybe 10 years to decode it...then a reply coming back at us 50 or 60 years later. Using a conservative estimate, IF someone is listening... Well it seems to me that we might have to wait 150 to 200 yrs for a response if one is forthcoming. I wonder if anyone willremember that this msg was sent. My question is, what poor sap on earth is going to receive the messsage and have to crack the coded response?
The translation is right here.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
After years of sending unsollicited messages, we're probably already blacklisted every SPAM list for the next gazillion years ;)
;)
If we ever get some message back it'll probably be:
DON'T SEND ANY MORE UNSOLLICITED MESSAGES
Failing to do so will result in legal action.
So, like, when the aliens decode the message, does that mean their first visitors to our planet will be arrested for violating the DMCA?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Hi! How are you?
.pdf file is at about the same level...
I send you this in order to have your advice.
Seriously, the grammar in that
Millions of dollars spent to send test pilots up into low earth orbit. The whole race to the moon. The current hope of sending people to mars. What a waste of time!
sigh.
How we know is more important than what we know.
cat message | sed 's/\(0\|1\)*/First Post/'
For those who can't be bothered to even read the /. synopsis:
Can you crack the code?...A hint to decoding: think simple raster based images and remember your powers of 2
The question in the synopsis, to which the title applies, is posed to earthlings. It's a funny. Get it yet?
We must warn them before it's too late. If they break the code they could face prosecution under the DMCA!
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
existed at http://totl.net/STI/.
Top Ten possible decoded messages in no particular order:
1) Resistance is Futile. You will be assimilated.
2) You've got mail!
3) Hi, how are you? I send this to you to have your advice.
4) w007!
5) link to goatsex
6) iFellOverandBroke <snicker>
7) All your Base are Belong to Us.
8) Get your *FREE* University Diploma!
9) For Entertainment purposes only. This message has been billed at $5.00 per AU
10) and last, but not least, this
but... but... but... all aliens speak english on Star Trek. You mean that's not true?
are among earthly creatures promoted as being highly intelligent, if we could communicate with them.
hello world
Why don't sent the message on plain language? Or even the message with the explanation? It can be found some centuries from now on a earth outpost and they will very much appreciate the help to translate it.
:-)
And don't forget to add a line to refuse unsolicited spam mail!
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
At the top it introduces numbers (0-12 then a few others). It shows a number in base 1 (just dots), then in binary, then the symbol they want to use for it, with their symbol for equals in between.
It then goes on to basic math and by looking at the numbers you can figure out what the operator is and its symbol. I make the first one out to be 1+1=2 and the second one (going down) is 1+2=3. Then comes geometry, atoms, spectral lines (?), etc.
The idea of these messages (they really need to be much longer to be useful) is that, by the end, you have an entire working language and can then start telling them stuff. I have a problem with this message because it wastes lots of space on pictures that have meaning to us but probably aren't very interesting to the aliens (case in point: the map of earth). These messages should be long and focus on text (symbols) and diagrams when necessary (the atoms).
For a *decent* article on these messages read Let's learn Lincos on the New Scientist website.
Note: I'm no linguist so If I can read it so can you. Give it another shot!
When the message arives to the aliens we will already be there to decode it.
Did anyone make a measure of the complexity of this message? That is a measure of the power of the sender.
The Knowledge Complexity of a message is one of most important measures of information. It takes out all the 'random', 'non-info' part of the message and try to see if there is any relevant info left.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
cfr. subj.
:)
about me A - B
About 10% noise has been added.
Except this appears to be in the form of removing 1s and replacing them by 0s only. If every 1 in 10 characters were inverted that would be more representative, but I don't really understand why they think that adding the noise demonstrates anything.
In practice this message should be broadcast repeatedly, eventually by averaging you should be able to remove most of the noise.
Frankly, I find the whole thing overly complex and obscure, as others have stated. If we have such a problem understanding it, what chance have any non-human intelligences? They are almost certainly to be totally unlike us, alien to be exact.
Actually it is rocket science...
Of cousrse there is no Terrestrial Intelligence.
If there were, they would realize the fraud stop payments to those charltans seeking something there isn't and marketing it as science.
This reminds me of those alchemists of middle ages who were searching for elixir of life and philosopher's stone and we werenot able to laugh at their 'science' until after few centuries.
Petrus
Gloria in excelsis Deo et in TERRA pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Ban Jon Katz From Slashdot.
The keyword here is observational bias. If there are 100 slots for the agents to exist in, it is unlikely that an agent would find itself being among the 10 first by pure chance, when there is a another explanation that says that there are only 10 slots in the first place. This is a simple and undebatable fact, and hardly the part of the argument that lends itself to attack.
int sum=0;
for(int i=0, int nr;i<N;i++){
if(rand()<0.5) nr=10;
else nr=100;
int you=random(nr);
Agent.Tell(you);
sum += (Agent.Guess() == nr);
}
Write Agent so that sum (# correct guesses) is maximized. (obvious solution: if(you>10) return 100; else return 10;)
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Somebody (some civilization) has to be the first, and that somebody will probably create the same probability scheme to explain why they haven't heard from anyone else yet.
In a hypothetical universe where civilization eventually comes about, some civilization has to be the first one. That civilization is going to be quite depressed that there's nobody else out there. It's a self-centered assumption, because the probability seems low that you'd be the first, but if there are any number of civilizations throughout the timespan of the universe, one of them had to have been the first one.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
It says:
FIRST POST!
You can't handle the truth.
welcome to your existance. you naive little fool.
Gee... Always nice with an ad hominem attack. What are you so bitter about?
We've barely placed any thought to the inner workings of the universe, of life, how it all works.
Correct. If the universe works very differently from what is currently thought, the argument certainly fall. This is of course implicit in just about every argument that anyone has ever given for anything.
as for your possible escape routes.. a borg mind is the best you could come up with?!?!
Under the assumption that the model is correct, that is one of the few ways that I can see. That does certainly not mean that I think it is the only out.
heres a little twist on your example. given that we exist now, is there not a good possibility that someone else exists somewhere? in the future or past? or even the present? with the billions upon billions of stars in our known universe, what are the odds that we are THAT much of a fluke?
Neat twist... You did read the title, right? The argument obviously allows civilizations to get to our population level. Just as long as they do not have significantly higher population and/or are aware of a significant number of other civilization (which would arguably follow advanced technology). If you have a million spots with equal probability that you exist in any of them, you will end up on one of them. Big deal. The quotation from the website refers to this scenario.
now couldn't we take that and notice that we are still here =) and that every day we are still here, the probability goes up that this loophole in the doomsday scenario is valid...
That's simply invalid logic.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Translation: For you young aliens!
1. Cut along the edges.
2. Fold along lines.
3. Use Universal Bonding Strips to tape the edges together.
4. Enjoy your model Earth.
and a small bit that says: Not suitable for aliens under the age of 1.7^19 cycles of Cs(133).
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Why does everyone assume that those we contact will be peaceful? What if we bring ourselves to the attention of the Kzinti, or their even nastier cousins, the Kilrathi?
It's a picture of the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympic Games.
Linux advocates are in a no Win situation
There's pr0n on page 01111.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
- Remove all the linefeeds.
- Remove the first 69 chars in the textfile.
- Insert linefeeds so that every line is 127 chars wide.
And what do we get from this?
- PI
- Pythagoras formula
- Our solar system
- Some basic chemestry formulas
- A picture of our cells
- A map of Earth
- And some stinky pr0n
The program needs to be rewritten so that it matches the stated problem. There needs to be an inner loop:
//Consider this simple program:
int sum=0;
for(int i=0, int nr;ii++){
if(rand()<0.5) nr=10;
else nr=100;
for(int j=0; j j++) {
int you=random(nr);
Agent.Tell(you);
sum += (Agent.Guess() == nr);
}
}
This correctly reflects the population bias in the stated problem. I don't believe Agent can return a statiscally better guess than to always return 100.
Isn't this spam?
think about it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I made a nice but bulky and incomplete page at http://newmanservices.com/seti
Speaking of doomsday, an interesting show on PBS last night (Nova: Death Star) speculated that the power and frequency of mysterious gamma ray bursts might explain why life isn't more common in the universe. Significant areas of entire galaxies can apparently get sterilized by one of these gamma ray events! Read more at pbs.org ...
yeah sorry about that. I think it was the whole borg mind thing... and you just seemed a bit too sure of a theory that didn't seem valid to me, and I got out of hand. you made some wild claims using ideas extrapolated from a VERY simple example to describe THE most complex system we know of...
also, even given your example, we just don't know WHAT significantly higher means. we can only guess at the size of the sample space. There is nothing well defined in the system. I believe that at this point, its all just mental masturbation.
as for my final parting shot... it seems quite logical to me... whats wrong with it?
I ate my sig.
Attn: Earth
Please cease and desit with all spamming activities.
/Hodzjxr, Crab Nebula Information Office
I've start encoding the message at http://www3.sympatico.ca/stephane_dumas/CETI/outpu t_stream.txt and found some serious errors:
It says that 2^0=0, 2^1=4 and 2^2=8 in the second page, and the list of prime numbers have 15, that isn't prime...
The second page:
1+1=2 1-1=0 1*1=1 1+2=3 1-2=1 1*2=2 3+2=5 3-2=1 3*2=6 1+0=1 1-0=1 1*0=0 1/1=1 1/3=0.33333... 1/2=0.5 4/3=1.33333... 3/2=1.5 1/9=0.11111... 1/0= 2/3=0.66666... 0-1=-1 1/11=0.09090... 1^1 =1 2^0 = 2 = OOOO 3^1 =3 1^1 =1 2^1 = 4 = OOXO 3^2 =9 1^2 =1 2^2 = 8 = OOXO 3^3 =21 1^3 =1 2^3 = 8 = XOOO 3^4 =81
4^2 =16 5^3 =125 9^3 =81
--------------
is infinity or undefinied.
Still not great but I think you'll be impressed. Click a "Glyph" (5x7 or 5x7 pixels) and it tries to figure it out. If it can't, you can add to it. But once you close you browser, your changes go away. http://newmanservices.com/seti/
Still not great but I think you'll be impressed. Click a "Glyph" (5x7 or 5x7 pixels) and it tries to figure it out. If it can't, you can add to it. But once you close you browser, your changes go away. http://newmanservices.com/seti/
You probability experts drive me crazy.
The odds of ANYTHING happening are 100%. The odds of anything NOT happening are also 100%.
The odds of someone attempting to analyze the probability of an event and succeding OR failing, are also 100%.
Try and extrapolate the Uncertainty Principle. Black holes even among the smallest order have a gravitational pull that will distort the very fabric of space-time and yet...particles still escape.
Why? because anything that can happen will, and anything that can't...still will. Even the laws of physics are just a set of observations.
And I disagree, "Given the following results of flipping a coin, what is the probability that the next flip will be a H:
HHHHHHHHHHH"
100%. Same thing for T, 100%. My point is, you can't know this before flipping the coin! Just like you can't know the path of a photon until you observe it. By doing so, you've effectively altered that path.
Any prediction is made bias by the observation...
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden