How To Talk To Aliens

Frederic Friedel writes: "In their efforts to talk to alien civilizations human beings are currently engaged in sending pictures based on a rectangular array of dots, arranged from left to right and top to bottom. But is this stategy sound? For instance what if the aliens do not see in pictures at all, or if they think in vector graphics rather than bitmap? On ChessBase.com grandmaster John Nunn proposes sending them a trading machine instead."

Comments

how to talk to aliens

[mickyflynn]

SHOUT A WHOLE LOT. It makes you easier to understand.

first post.

We Need an Intergalactic Fleet

[mfh]

But is this stategy sound?

No. Aliens will look at the pictures and wonder what:
"ÿØÿà" means, when they open it in a text editor. Simply put, there is no easy way to communicate with Aliens. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

Imagine you're on a mountain top and you want to send a communication to someone else on another mountain top. What form of communication do you use? If you're trying to reach another human being you might be able to send smoke signals, and it would help to know what language that person speaks, or the communication won't work -- they will see the smoke but interpret it incorrectly.

If you fire up a short wave and start sending broadcasting, the other party would only be able to listen if they have the same equipment or at least the ability to listen and understand what you're sending. So high tech is dependant on the odds that your independent civilizations went in the same direction in their research and development, which statistically is likely implausible.

The bottom line is that we might send information into space that will provoke the wrong response, or worse -- we might cause the aliens to believe that there is a strange natural phenomena on Earth that is not worthy of scientific study, and cause them to ignore any future attempts at communication. We should be attracting aliens by producing a stable intergalactic fleet of killer robot ships. They will want to trade with us if we have heavy firepower. It's a status thing, really.

If the aliens are evil, they will respect us. If they are peaceful, they will want to come and try to enlighten us. If we have massive intergalactic firepower, it's a win / win.

If we are weak, the evil aliens will subjugate us into slavery and good aliens will skip us because they have more pressing matters to attend to - such as the rise of a new threat in another quadrant of space they need to try and enlighten.

Therefore, the missile defense program would benefit Canada and the US - because of the aliens!

Sending signals into a void won't be successful.

Meh ...

[jdwest]

I bet they don't support PNG, either.

If there's one thing we've learned from SoapTrek..

[Anonymous Coward]

...then it's the fact that all aliens speak english, everywhere, be they green-blooded pointy-eared intrigant warmongers or some kind of vampiric drow-morlocks from another galaxy. OK, that was SG:Atlantis, but anyway, everyone speaks english. Except Klingons. Out of spite, I suppose.

I have a better idea

[Golias]

Stop announcing that we are here.

Odds are, there's nobody out there listening. Seriously. Space is really big and really empty. The nearest star with a planet is mind-numbingly far away, and the nearest star likely to have a planet which supports life as we know it is even farther away. It's a safe bet that one would need to go yet even farther to find a planet where even tool-users have evolved, let alone an advanced civilization.

If anybody out there is able to get the and reply anytime soon, then they are probably sufficiently advanced that they would probably regard us as little more than animals. Very noisy animals. They will simply blow up the Earth to stop us from hogging bandwith with out SETI broadcasts.

So please, for the sake of humanity, STFU.

Ha!

[Saint Aardvark]

The AI could be instructed to trade up to a particular level and then it would require authorisation from Earth confirming that the traded items had been received before proceeding. This would slow things down but it would still be a lot faster than working without the AI at all.

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Re:I got a better idea

[sharkey]

Perhaps they saw a certain goat-related website, and all the anal-probing is just them trying to say "Hello".