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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."
One potential problem I think we face is that the potential aliens that we could talk to will have a wide timeframe of technological development. Some of them may be incredibly advanced and maybe already communicating with many other civilizations themselves (call this time C). So the question then becomes, why would they bother listening to us or would they even care what we are saying? On the other hand, there may be life out there, but it might be underdeveloped (call this time B) and cannot even hear us yet.
Although I think that it is highly likely that their are other civilizations out there, I think that the number of such civilizations that we can currently contact that are between times B and C may be small.
Right now the human race seems to think that whatever they say is worth listening too, much like stories posted by people on slashdot, in their webblogs, or this very comment. But sufficiently advanced minds aren't always interested in these things.
So I think a better way to go about it is, what could we send to an advanced civilization that would be interesting to them? Not to us.
What, like American tourists do in Europe and elsewhere?
Seriously, two words for you: phrase book.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
As long as there is no proof of their existence, sending stuff equals wasting a lot of money. IMHO, we'd better use that money to do some other stuff that actually helps people on our planet.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
You never know, they might be picking up our p0rn transmissions already and trying to figure out our mating rituals.
I dread to think what their conclusions would be!
Philip
Signatures are broken
But we are seeking for life outside Earth using our standards (carbon, voice frequency). Who tell us that aliens have our biotype and can understand what are we saying of what wee send to the space?
http://www.michel.eti.br
The point of sending up any type of message is in hopes that the receiving party will recognize it as something of extraterrestrial (from the alien standpoint) origin and will investigate. That's why we look for radio waves with non accounted for sequences. The aliens could be trying to send us a picture, or a string of characters, or whatever, but we probably won't ever know it. We will however know that it is not natural and will further investigate. We hope that other intelligent life will do the same.
Or European tourists in America?
:\
Or no, that statement would be just as stereotypical as the parent's. No, no, I guess we'll all just have to accept there are assholes and idiots everywhere.
Lucky us
Even if we manage to send data in an understandable format, how do alies actaully go about and *understand* it. In communication studies they talk about common ground, two parts of a communiaction must share a basic notion of the primtive concepts. However an alien race might have completely different concepts to begin with. How do they see that they receive a message with our intent? There are patterns in everything, but you need some basic things to hold onto to seperate noise patterns from what you really want to see.
Won't work on aliens any more than it'll work on humans.
If you send someone some information and the key to unlock that information then you haven't actually protected yourself.
How can he suggest that a bitmap image is too complicated but that having the aliens compile an AI we send them is easy cheesy? Why would we send them what would have to be a supermassive program full of mostly encrypted data and assume that they would figure out how to run it but not figure out how to crack the encryption. It's like saying, "Instead of sending them a photo of a submarine, let's send them the blueprints and the parts (but with some parts of the blueprints blacked out and those parts in a sealed black box)." It just doesn't make sense.
Huh? What method of visual representation do we "think in"? My brain does not work on bitmaps, or vectors, but on a pattern-analysing neural nework. In other words, my brain is not limited to a single representation scheme, and I seriously doubt that an alien culture capable of receiving these messages would be so limited.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
There are so many basic assumptions in communicating with possible aliens, such as assuming they even use radio, that it seems patently wasteful to try and second guess what an alien civilisation would or would not understand. If one is going to use radio messages, wouldn't it simply be the easiest to beam a pattern that is obviously artificial, repeated endlessly. The actual content of the pattern should be as simple as possible, but needn't even contain anything meaningful, since anything meaningful is probably only going to be meaningful to us.
Any civilation spotting the repeated pattern and deducting that it is artificial would then hopefully respond. Sure, the actual modalities of how to communicate with them would then take centuries or decades, but why were you were hoping for ET to walk into your living room next week in the first place?
The universe is a big place and travel amongst the stars, even at light speed, is a multigenerational process.
Have they tried talking to dolphins, who we are pretty damn sure are intelligent?
mark
Check out this little gem "I think there are good ways round the first objection. The AI program would continually check its own integrity and its ability to modify itself. If these checks failed then it could self-destruct. The aliens would then have to start again with a fresh copy of the program which would, at the least, be irritating.
The article starts off pretty good, but devolves into some rather circular and odd logic. He does bring up an interesting problem, but he should have just given us an outline of the solution... instead of the drivel that finishes the article.
What could we possibly have that's so freaking special that these aliens would have to come here and take it from us? Resources? Plenty of asteroids and uninhabited planets out there. Food? Probably lots of planets out there teeming with life that somehow just never got the intelligence thing going.
Sure, you can make up some horror movie reason for them to invade (They need our WOMEN! To BREED!) but I think most alien races who investigate us will mark us down as just another carbon-based bipedel life form, nothing special, make a note and move on to the next system.
The article is utter crap, by the way. First, let's laugh at the idea that the aliens might read right to left, and thus will be totally incapable of deciphering our messages. And the main thrust of the article sounds like something from Master of Orion. We send the alien race a machine programmed with all of our secrets, and they "trade" by transmitting one of their secrets to us, upon which our machine releases a secret to them. The machine is, of course, totally hack-proof. And secrets are these nice little comparmentalized things, like Neutronium Armor or Black Hole Generators, which can be traded one-for-one.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
we'd probably require the Aliens to 'upgrade' (laughably) to a Word® 2005 site license before we can successfuly communicate.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
"aliens even must find out too that microwaves (with the correct frequency) can make water molecules move and heat food."
Assuming they exist in the small temperature range where water is a liquid.
Spiders? You mean capture for food. No applicable, everything needs to eat.
As for the ants, you mean capture for slaves, again, not applicable as the slave ants are integrated into the colony as one of their own (ie assimalation)
The key to the whole story is PET. What other animals keep pets besides humans. NONE. It is a waste of resources in the primal world of pure survival.
That was the point of the story, the guys kept a pet (much like the aliens were doing to them) so they must be intelligent.
While that is a good theory, how many people who work in menial captivity based jobs will even gather that the tapping is in fact a prime number? or for that mater what a prime number is? Or considering the Stanford Prison Experiment and the results regarding the opinions of Guards and Prisoners, would they even care?
Also, how do you SHOW numbers in a universal form over a radio? Binary is not exacly universal, and as the article mentions, how do we assume it will be put together correctly? Perhaps X number of pulses with a break between them, but considering how radio frequencies are monitered here, they might just hear 2 pulses and changing frequencies.
There are many instances of so-called "convergent evolution" in nature. Perhaps due to the fact that the laws of physics are (likely) pretty much the same throughout the universe, and that the phylogeny out there is due in part to those laws (two eyes and two ears to see and hear in stereo, nose below eyes and mouth below nose in most creatures, 2 limbs on each side of the body, bilateral symmetry etc.) My conclusion is that perhaps, the way we communicate is *more likely than you think* to be similar to the way a completely independently-developing intelligent race of beings might communicate.
There is also no reason to think that they wouldn't find us TASTY!
I sort of doubt this... While I am generalizing and admit lack of experience in the matter (it's true... I have no actual experience dealing with other life forms), I feel that:
1. A natual progression of an advanced species is to grow food instead of relying on hunting it. Any species that is capable of receiving our signal and/or traveling here no doubt has long ago worked out the whole "food" problem.
2. Humans just aren't a great food source. We are too boney and don't have a lot of meat on us. Even aside from the obvious mental reason why we don't eat other humans, the fact remains that humans wouldn't be able to compete with other animals as a food source regardless. Chickens have a lot of meat on them for their size, can grow quickly, are comparitively easy to raise, keep and control, etc. If aliens were interested in getting food from earth, there is little reason why they too would not look to cows, chicken and fish as well.
Just my $0.02...
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
I think that the main problem is that we may be too far away from alien civilizations. I think one good way to announce galaxy-wide that "we are here" is to start blowing nukes in space. Not in low orbit. Our gamma radiation satellites can dial in minutes (or was it in seconds now) on gamma burst sources anywhere in the universe.
:) (assuming we broadcast only single-digit primes)
I suppose aliens would be interested in those gammabursts too. Not good if something starts emitting gamma rays too close. So, my suggestion: First burst is a high-yield "Prime", then followed up by a series of smaller nukes so that anyone focusing on our direction sees or hears a couple of primenumbers. That should be next to impossible in universe and we have enough nukes to keep this going yearly for next 1000 years.
Another, probably more plausable reason would be that any alien life is likely to use incompatible chemical processes. We would likely be quite unpalatable and possibly even poisonous.
He who has the code and the data has the full power.
Posted AC so as not to karma whore.
Keeping other creatures captive is a sign of intelligence.
No it isn't. Spiders, termites, fish, many kinds of snake, bears, great cats, various kinds of bacteria and two kinds of creature in Angband keep other things captive.
Trapping something is a sign of cunning. Cunning is not intelligence. Hunting animals all have cunning.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Yeah, we should definately turn off the multiple megawatt message lasers broadcasting peace, prosperity, and the hope for communication, because nobody's going to see the hundreds of gigawatts of waste light and heat generated by tokyo alone.
Maybe you didn't realize this, but earth gives off more radiant energy than a brown dwarf. If we really want to hide, we need to do two things:
1) build a wall around the entire planet
2) get a really fast corvette and drive around collecting the radio waves we've been giving off for a hundred years
(and because I'm on slashdot, 3) ???, 4) profit)
Translation: put out the welcome mat. We announced our presence long, long ago.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Indeed. Untill now we have failed to communicate with any other lifeforms than our own, right here on planet Earth.
We also fail to accnowledge other lifeforms the rights to a habitat or even life itself.
This might just indicate that we should rehearse our understanding and dealing with other lifeforms locally, before even considering any intergalactic chit chat.