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?
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
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."
Well, if you're looking for terrestrial Intelligence as the headline to this article says, you're looking in the wrong place!
and wrap it around the space shuttle, you get the Pepsi Logo.
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.
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...
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?
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
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
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
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.
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
Yes, we know your pumped about your "new" article. But seriously, your article was only vaguly on the same topic. Don't stretch it.
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.
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!
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.
"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,
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.
...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
OMG i've got it! It's a picture of the tall black monolith off 2001!
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Actually, I believe the idea is that they're trying to make the message available to even the most basic of intelligent life forms that may receive it. In other words, they're transmitting messages based on the way they themselves look for them.
::shrug::
The idea for cutting down the noise is so that whatever has a chance of picking up the message won't just ignore as more noise. This message will stand out, and if anyone happens to hear a bit of it, they'll stop and think, "Wait a second... I don't know what that is, but that's definitely SOMETHING". It's like putting their message in large, bold print on a billboard instead of putting it in small, italic print on a flyer. It makes whatever has a chance of seeing it actually notice it, rather than pass it over.
And remember, this is the sort of message that even we can receive. Many people assume that aliens will be energy-based lifeforms millions of years ahead of us in development like the Vorlons or the Taelons, but the reality is that this sort of message could be picked up by aliens that haven't even mastered space travel, and may even be in their own unique technological equivalent to the late 19th or early 20th century. I always wonder why so many people are convinced that whatever we come across could actually be a little bit behind us in development... maybe it's humility, or maybe it's just too much science fiction TV shows.
Actually, I believe the idea is that they're trying to make the message available to even the most basic of intelligent life
I know about some marketing executives they could test it on...
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 think we've just been insulted.
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.
If you picked up thesignal somewhere it would be pretty easy to determine exactly where it came from. When you pick up a signal that has been traveling for trillions of miles it is little more than a point of EM radiation coming from a specific point. Once you have the LOS it has been traveling you can do a shift analysis ro figure our how far away the planet was that sent it. Then you turn your high powered telescope onto that point and blamo you see a little blue ball orbiting a slightly green star next to a trinary system in the middle of nowhere. That assumes of course they're in this galaxy, for most people outside our galaxy they'd be able to tell what galaxy the signal came from and hopefully from the content of the message figure out what sort of people sent it. Let's just hope the goats.cx trolls don't get ahold of a powerful transmitter or we're going to be paved over to make for an interstellar overpass.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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?)
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?
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
primes, other then 15, person making this must've messed up.
That 15 is in there just to f*** with their heads. We can't have the aliens thinking we're too smart, or being totally sure that the sequence with 15 in it isn't somehow important.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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!
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.
are among earthly creatures promoted as being highly intelligent, if we could communicate with them.
Why isn't the parent at a +5 (Insightful/Informative/Underrated) yet? This is one of the most insightful posts *ever* on this forum. If there is sentient, advanced, intelligent life in other galaxies, by the time they arrive they will conclude that we were not intelligent because we managed to kill each other and make the planet uninhabitable for all other Earth species (well, except roaches).
On a side note, have any of the SETI people considered the possibility that sentient beings from other galaxies may not speak English?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
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!
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...
I'd probably even go so far as to say they're probably not. Space is harsh. And who's to say we won't be obsolete by our own inventions 1000 years from now.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Actually it makes more sense than trying to ask a question, as it makes for something obvious to talk about in a reply.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
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.
Actually, it's probably there to intice them to make the correction.
You mean the first message another species receives from us is a troll?
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?
Isn't this spam?
think about it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the probleme related to 15 has been fixed.
Why does that not inspire confidence?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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/