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

Prime Numbers

[NetNifty]

On a Star Trek TNG episode I seem to remember Picard tapping out prime numbers to show that he was an intelligent species to another species who were holding him captive, the theory being that maths is a universal constant. Dunno how that would work for communicating, but it would be a good way to show intelligence, or at least draw attention to ourselves if we so desired.

Re:Prime Numbers

[DNS-and-BIND]

Despite the obvious risk of referring to "The Next Generation" as a good science example to follow, you will remember that Picard's attempt had no effect whatsoever.

He should have sent them a uuencoded video of Hitler in the 1936 Olympics instead.

maybe this is not so smart?

[Interfacer]

We seem to try very hard to draw some inter galactical attention to ourselves, just like any restaurant wanting to attract customers.

the only difference being: we do not sell the food, we are the food.

anyone who has the means of traveling here from outer space outclasses us by several orders of magnitude. thus we are in no bargaining position if we have (or are) something they want.

this raises the question: should we try to make ourselves heard, or should we try to detect others?

Worse yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if what we are sending them translates as insults in their language?

Hmm, that's a pretty dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course a chess master thinks that teaching people to play chess is the solution to the world's problems. What else would he think?

If all you know of a culture is how to play chess, when you visit you'd be shocked to see that people don't move with rigid constraints based on their title, and that not everyone is trying to "mate" a "king." Just absurd.

Now, sending general purpose AI... that's brilliant. If we could design a HAL 2000 to send at the speed of light to the aliens, that's a very different thing indeed.

Re:I have a better idea

[wjsteele]

Actually, the neareset star with a planet is approximately 93,000,000 miles from Earth.

And, my prediction is that they will blow up the Earth to make room for a new intergalactic highway bypass. (Unfortunatly, it'll probabally get destroyed just 5 minutes before it completes running a program that will give us the ultimate answer... oh, it's been working on it now for almost 10 million years.)

Bill

neither numbers nor math are universal, power is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keeping other creatures captive is a sign of intelligence. I remember one SF story I read where 3 people were captured and put in basically an earth zoo. They tried everything to show the aliens they were an intelligent species but everything they tried failed. Finally, once they admitted defeat, they decided to at least make the zoo a bit like home so one of them created a basic cage and caught one of the mice in the zoo to keep as a pet. Once the aliens saw the mouse in the cage they promptly released the prisoners and opened the lines of communication.

The moral, any idiot can makes noises (speech) or tap out prime numbers (lots of animals can count, at least subconsciously) but only an intelligent species will imprison what they consider unintelligent.

If anyone knows the name of the short story let me know because I would love to read it again.

Communicating with aliens.

[Saggi]

Communicating with aliens.

I use to play a game with some friend a long time ago. Basically it was about the concept of communicating with aliens. You create two teams. (And keep one or two persons as referee). Now one team had to come up with the concept of an alien race. They would line up their basic way of living and their primary way of communication. The other team should compose a message and a way of sending it to the other team. The referees would then listen to the two parties and deciding how the communication would work (or not).

This little game is a good way to explore the issues faced by communicating into space. Sometimes the races would be underwater sea squid-type of monsters the communicated with sound waves. Other times they used tactile or chemical communication. The last is an obvious way of communicating, as most parts of our body uses this way of communication internally.

Sometimes we would put some special requirements, like the race should have long range communication abilities or should be able to do space travel. The last requirement forced the race team to explain why and how the race would pursue the space quest.

We always faced the core issue of how to transmit the message. It is obvious to uses certain radio frequencies. (There are some wavelengths that are fairly silent in our universe, that would be obvious to use. But check out some of our attempt to locate alien, like SETI for further references of these).

To get their attention it would be obvious to send something out of the ordinary. We have looked fore some time into space now, and have a fairly good idea of how things should look. Now anyone interested would pickup anything that would not be familiar. They would then try to determine if it was intelligent (us?) or some new phenomenon. Sending primes would be good. But anything will really work.

Then the issue as stated in this Slashdot bullet comes next. How to encode the message. Out group quickly found some common issues. If the race communicated with light (sight) they should fairly easy be able to decode an image. Send some basic images, square, circle etc. to define how you have encoded you image. Any intelligent species (and anyone listing to space would probably be), would fairly quickly be able to decode the image. Any race not using sight would probably never decode an image! The same goes for basically all the other weird kinds of communication we came up with. Sound (ears) indicated waves...ect. Basically the message should hold several (identical) encodings of the same message.

But other issues arose in our discussions. Would it be communication? The answer is no. It would be a one-way message. To do communication would be stupid. Wait 50, 100 or more years to answer? So any kind of "How is the weather over there?". "Do you have a cure for cancer?" (Laugh) - would be really foolish. The message should be a one-way (but might be a long one).

But what should we send. The most obvious (if images would be used) would be sending an image of a man and woman. (Where did I hear that before). But to any alien this would be completely without any kind of content. What would these two shapes be? The outline of a gas could in space to guide the way. (No they would not like to travel so far). They might be able to guess... this is how the aliens (us) looks like. Many images with this familiar shape. A good guess. But they would never know. Let's say there was images of cars. (I think we have a lot of that kind of images if we send thousands of images to the in order to tell about us. This familiar shape from before? Is it born from this other shape that we sometimes see it inside. Or do the biggie eat the four-pointy thing with the knob? See?

Try to pick 10-15 images and try to guess what it is if you were an alien? No this was the second part of our two team's effort. How did they interpret the message from the human team? It's a quite funny game, but also quite serious for those who wish to communicate with aliens.

Re:What do they want to hear?

[joanofclark]

"What do they want to hear"? i think the more important question is, what do we want to convey? The content of the message should have no purpose other than the goal of communication. If the message contains data that any kind of intent other than communication could be inferred, we open the door to misunderstanding. To me, math is the obvious candidate. Not some kind of fancy equation to demonstrate our intelligence or level of understanding or to probe theirs, but simply numbers. i would send a sequence of numbers, 1 through 10 in order then 1 through 10 in random order. The goal of sending ordered then unordered numbers is to demonstrate that we are sending the message on purpose and that our intent is only to establish communication. If/When we get a reply is when we start focusing on content, as i think this should be based upon what kind of response we actually get. i'm not a wicked smart guy but this seems like the safest, most efficient approach to contacting alien life. i'd hate to see the population of the earth collectively utter "Please don't kill the messenger" because of some galactic misunderstanding.

Duh

[Viking Coder]

1) Create an AI and email it to aliens
2) ???
3) Profit!

All kidding aside, this article is lame. Starting from the premise of an AI is - how should I put this? - poop. At this point, presuming that we can create AI (computable on a Turing machine, no less) is no more plausible than finding aliens to communicate with.

Re:What do they want to hear?

[Floody]

Like us humans do not care much about a dog barking at the mailman, since explaining to a dog the purpose of a mailman's visit is beyond a dog's comprehension.

Ahhh, but might not the dog seem much more interesting if you had never before seen a dog?

Re:What do they want to hear?

[gadget junkie]

"[...]Or perhaps they were just given their knowledge from another race?"

...It has already been done, time and again, here on mother earth.
First, the greek-latin culture founded the basis for the modern science; after that, the arabs copied and expanded modern science as we know it,, whilst western europe wallowed in the middle ages. after some time, the pendulum swung.
The problem is, no civilization can "teach" another one scientific progress. If a culture is interested, it will try and learn whatever others have learnt, PLUS it will eventually add some original content of its own. On the other hand, a civilization that does not want to learn most probably won't.

I always recall the story about the crab nebula. it contains a pulsar, the rotating remains of a supernova, and progressively the rotation is slowing down. it one of the basis of the discovery that you can date novas by timing the rotation of the pulsar remains. We were able to ascertain that, because we know the exact date of the explosion. records say that it could be seen clearly even by day, for days on end. Point is , these records are chinese . no records are available from western europe or arab sources.