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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."
They stole this idea from Contact. The first layer of the signal was a list of the first so many prime numbers.
True, but the various "send shit out into space" projects don't have a funky and well-known name, and I was having too much fun with my rant to get bogged down with facts. (Or, as I see while reading it again, grammar.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually, the neareset star with a planet is approximately 93,000,000 miles from Earth.
The nearest planet with a giantic ball of gas in an irregular orbit, sure.
Life on Earth is made possible by several important factors:
1. The Earth is just the right distance for most of the water to be in liquid form most of the time.
2. The star it orbits is stable enough for that distance to be about the same temperature all the time, and this has been the case for at least a few million years.
3. The Earth stays at about that distance all the time in a stable, nearly-circular orbit.
4. The Earth is large enough to support an atmosphere, but small enough not to become a crushingly heavy gas giant.
5. There are exteremly massive planets in outlying orbits or the same star system which tend to attract a lot of debris which might otherwise collide with Earth.
6. Those big planets are also in stable, fairly circular orbits, and are in no danger of colliding with Earth.
There nearest star where all these conditions are likely to be meet? More than 93 Million miles, I bet.
"However, not every one of them is inhabited."
With you so far.
"Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds."
Does not necessarily follow from the preceding statement.
My other processor is big-endian.
They'll come us, study us and use our language.
At least, that's what I would do if I would be interested in talking to an ant on an anthill: just spray some pheromones and see how it responds.
In that case, given their obvious technological superiority, it's more reasonable to assume that they'll come to us and spray a good deal of pheromones, to see how we respond...
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Your post reminded me of this funny little short story.
http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html
I suppose you could send a bitmap that depicts basic logical operations. Then you send a picture about a network of logical operations that references those in previous piture but uses less information to represent them (because they are known from the previous pictures). These logical presentations then depict how to process the next batch of information that is more heavily compressed (and has error correction). And then you send the AI.
*Or you could send them an Mac virus that installs the AI into their system..*
Anyway. Reading the article, at least I, got the feeling that constructing that kind of AI might be pretty damn difficult. Oh well, using AIs might really be the best way to communicate..
Store with salt
Unlikely. Check out the variety of life on earth; it's quite unlikely that intelligence will evolve in humanoid form. The prerequisites for (technological) intelligence are manipulatory organs (hands, tentacles, pseudopods) and sensory organs (ears, eyes, chemical sensors, radio receivers). There's no point in supposing that their organs will be arranged in the same way that ours are! And besides, there's the fact that different planets present different environments and therefore, different evolutionary pressures. Do you think that a methane-breathing, silicon-based, high-gravity lifeform would be anything like us at all?
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
You are referring to Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut.