Slashdot Mirror
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.
SHOUT A WHOLE LOT. It makes you easier to understand.
first post.
I sure hope someone figures out how to talk to aliens sometime soon. I keep asking the IT guys to fix my computer, but I've not yet gotten a response.
We trade'em some pr0n.
What if they're a communist society? Certainly they shall be disgusted at our capitalist ways.
This is why we need to send them what everybody loves...
Pr0n!
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.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I bet they don't support PNG, either.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
Can they tell me how to talk to women?
Could happen. Hey, it worked for these guys.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
You speak to them in Spanish.
That was a 90s movie, you fool.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
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
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.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
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?
With my old trusty rocketlauncher.
I never leave home without it.
welcome our chess playing urg alkjdlkwmne
----------
'lo all, we hve descph3rd U'r lanugage from th!s thing U call the 'net.' We hoope U get our l33t! commun!casion. struth afk
----------
overlords.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
What if what we are sending them translates as insults in their language?
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
...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.
Something to the effect of "Hello and welcome to the Earth. Please ensure you have filled out all necessary documentation and are carrying a valid Earth passport. Aliens that are not in compliance with current Earth visitation regulations will be sent back to planet of origin. Thank you."
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
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.
Sadly, I believe he is confusing Independence Day with Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
/.
He clearly should not be posting on
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.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I learned everything I know about alien languages from Celestia. You may know her as 'Anne Heche'... She has a primer for alien languages that is included as part of a Barbara Walters interview, and it rocks.
It's all centered around what is called The Gospel Of Love. The doorway to Celestia's Heaven is in Fresno.
ERROR: You do not have a client license for the feature NUCLEARFUSION. Please contact licensing@earthtechnologysales.earth and report FlexLM error number 0x7008930B.
Carousel is a lie!
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.
All your base hmmm?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Remember, if you are communicating with Klingons, loudspeakers that playing recordings of properly-structured sentences is not enough. There must be a device to spray spittle at the same time the sound is output.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
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.
That's why I wear my tinfoil hat wherever I go.
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.
If they can understand Perl, they can understand just about any human language.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Well how many people run SETI at home?
Time A aliens may well be listening for other aliens, just are we are running SETI at home.
Someone, not sure who, descided that we should look for FM signals perticular wave band because that was the easiest way to send a signal accross space so that's what we should look for. I think they use the same reasoning with the send out messages which seems fair.
I don't think they send out messages any more just incase the alines are of the vorgon destroyer type. But I think if they were it woudn't matter if we sent out a signal or not.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Now we can find out if Earth girls are easy.
When they see that we have the tubgirl, they'll think we abducted an alien and then TOTAL CHAOS!
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
Think about it - as long as what we're sending out is clearly nonrandom, an alien race would interpret it to mean there is someone trying to communicate. Send Fibonacci sequences or something.
Why confuse the poor bastards by assuming that their cognitive apparatus is so radically different than ours, when it's most likely not? Chances are that they evolved somewhere basking in enough stellar energy to support complex life, so it's highly doubtful that they would have achieved space travel without having at least evolved the ability to percieve light and discern imagery. So just show 'em some pictures of the kids, a newspaper or two, and maybe some porn. All this geometric and binary crap is just going to confuse them; they'll spend lots of time trying to figure out stuff that not even we understand, when all they'll really want is to observe us as we are!
President: What do you want us to do?
Alien(through Brent Spiner): Just DIE!!!
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.
How are they going to moderate it?
Troll? Offtopic? Flamebait? Interesting? Funny? Insightful?
The aliens I would really like to communicate with are the more ancient ones who are going to metamoderate...
the article mentions an AI to be send to the aliens to trade information with them. The problem is, once this all knowing AI reached them they won't bother trading mith it. Instead they'd just disassemble it and instantly gain access to all the worlds knowledge. not the smartest way to trade IMHO
See pictures of tits
"I am Gugvunt Blaharn,the only son of late former Grand Dominator, Chief Gugvunt Vader Sr of Vulcan Diamond and Mining corporation.
I must confess my agitation is real, and my words is my bond, in this proposal. My late father diverted these space-credits meant for purchase of ammunition and General Products hulls, for my homeworld, during the peak of disastrous civil war in our planets, now he has deposited the money in the BANK in Tattoine, where I amresiding under political asylum with my mother Mary Many-Tentacles and younger brood sister.
Now the war in my country is over with the help of Romulan soldiers, the present government of Vulcan has revoked the passport of all officers who served under the former regime and now ask star empires to expel such person at the same time freeze their account and confiscate their asset, it is on this note that I am contacting you, all I needed from you is to furnish me with your bank particulars:
1) Account name
2) Account number
3) Number of tentacles
4) Enumerated psychic powers that can be used as weapons
5) Bank address, telephone and fax number, and # of P.O. box on Vogon homeworld.
For you to assist me transfer these credits your private bank account, the said amount is $17.5 Million or equivalent weight in gold-pressed latinum.
I am compensating you with 20 % of the total credits, now all my hope is banked on you and I really wants to invest this money in your planet, were their is stability of government, spontaneous mutations Borg colonization, political and economic welfare.
Honestly I want you to believe that this transaction is real and never a joke. My late father gave me the certificate of deposit issued to him by the BANK on the date of deposit, for you to be clarify because, I do not expose my self to anybody I see, I believe that you are able to keep this transaction secret for me because this money is the hope of my life, it is important."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
normal language based on misspellings, like "stategy", or will be staunch right-wingers and understand Bush's "strategery".
A view of our solar system from the most distant planetoid, Sedna. You can get this picture in very high resolution here - it makes an excellent wallpaper for your Windows desktop.
What if I don't use Windows, you insensitive clod!
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
So the aliens are smart enough to pick this particular signal from all the "I Love Lucy", "Dukes of Hazzard" and "CSI" signals. They figure out how to port it to their own hardware, and this guy thinks they won't be able to crack the encryption? Next thing we know, the EIITA (Earth Industry Intergalactic Trade Association) will be notifying them they are taking legal action because "slkdfj&*#$" son of "sdlfs8dr423" is using carbon nano tubes on his model intergalactic star destroyer.
with aliens that I can see is the flash-card method. Show a picture, and a word, with the word being either spoken or written. Of course this method couldn't possibly work with aliens that don't see as we do, or for unfamiliar objects but the basic principle isn't much different than what would have been used when two new cultures met for the first time.
My Site, My Life
Never mind the content of the message. Just set up a beacon for those aliens who are capable of interstellar travel (and other advanced things) to get their attention. Even better, try something better that lightspeed-limited signaling. Try something using tunneling.
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.
All your chess belong to us
This is not here.
they don't see in Bitmap. I just accidentally sent a picture of Goatse up.
You have a good point. I think the planet-busting bombs will be headed our way as soon as they decode and view "Veronica's Closet". Either that, or "Darmha and Greg".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Reminds me of a Vonnegut novel (Breakfast of Champions, I think) that talks about a race of Martians that communicate by farting and tap dancing.
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.
Not using the universal language of math, why are they trying to use pictures?
And what will that picture say? 'Take me to your leader'?
What if they see that as a declaration of war and attack us? Or a plea for help? What if they interpret that as, 'we want all your unattractive females' and we get overrun by aliens?
Maybe then I can use this line..... 'Whatever dude; at least you get to do something'...
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); }
Let AI just take over their world ! Mwahahaha
This very scenario was explored - with humans on the receiving end - in the book "An XT Named Stanley".
http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/daw501-600.html
A nice computer scientist is called in to build what the alien instruction manual describes. Given cameras and microphones, the gizmo ultimately became self-aware and aware of it's mission. Then the evil government types try to hack into it's mind so it would disgorge all it's information. Stanley manages to beam his findings back to wherever he came from before self-destructing.
Anyhow, it's a pretty good read - and very reminiscent of this proposition.
...they are civilized enough not to talk.
Ask them if their refridgerator is running...
This is completely false. This is not a sig.
Aaa Jaa.. Aaa Jaa Re...
For the musically inclined:
D A.. A B G...
if ETs did know of us why would they bother with us, we humans can not get along together, we have wars & crime all the time as if it is normal, i bet ET probably has a sign posted on the dark side of the moon saying"
"DANGER - Do not feed the humans"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What about spiders who capture other insects ?
What about ants who grow other insects inside settlement ?
Léa Gris
Europeans are, duh, more accustomed to dealing with people who speak another language. Americans mostly aren't, barring Spanish in some spots. Add to that the "lingua Franca" status of English, so that we tend to assume someone has some English. (And again, sometimes it works. Shop children in the Grand Market in Istanbul speak awfully good English, they need it to sell with.) Without bashing American tourists, who are generally cool and curious people, there's something to the stereotype.
Ordinarily I'd go along with "people are people, we all have our foibles," but that just doesn't match my experience.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Let's hope the aliens don't try to intercept Japanese websites with browsers that don't have Japanese language support. They'll think we're a very one confused people.
Fortunately, someone has already done all the work for us.
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.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
(Parenthetically, I do keep wondering how astronomical distances and times and relativistic effects would affect copyright expiration times. )
Why don't we just ask them? They should know, they are probably talking to each other all the time.
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
If this AI is sent with all the information that we are supposedly "trading", then the aliens already have it... ok, so maybe the AI has some sophisticated translation routine that is required to turn the nuclear fusion reactor plans into Alien, but the data's still there.
And if they're sufficiently intelligent to intercept our transmissions, decipher out logic-gate data, build an Intel P4 system, install Linux, and run this AI program, then they're probably smart enough to dis-assemble the AI code and figure out out to translate the plans without the help of the AI (or remove the have-they-sent-data-to-earth routine).
It just occured to me that the only way you can make anything, and I mean thing, not person, aware of you is by making a large signal in the form of "yoohoo, hallooo, hey!". In other words by making a very big bang visible over light years in most of the wavelengths of the EM spectrum.
:D
Maybe blow up Jupiter
The nearest stars to our sun, Alpha Centauri A and B, are by far the closest to our sun in terms of light output, size and heat in our interstellar neighbourhood. Both of those two stars could support earth type planets.
And it's 4 light years away. A very powerful, fusion powered craft, traveling at 10% the speed of light, could reach it in 40 years.
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.
This is one of the stupidest articles I've ever read. I don't know how this guy became a chess grandmaster.
There's no reason to think that aliens wouldn't find us cute.
There is also no reason to think that they wouldn't find us TASTY! Or vice versa, we might find them quite delicious, leading to the question, "White or Red wine with Alien?"
We are listening to them, how loudly are we broadcasting? And does it say "Eat at Earth"?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Alien governments are receiving the earth transmissions, for sure. They just sweep that shit under the rug into their own Area 51.
Take me to your leader!
Primates have you eaten recently.
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.
Windows 98 used a similar strategy to prohibit productivity. You would be almost done with a word document and the PC would lock tight.
What evidence is there that Aliens regard firepower as something important? Maybe the aliens fear a giant intergalactic dildo more? To be on the safe side we should do both and put them in orbit immediately.
Standards Schmandards
His theory has a LOT of problems with it. First, keep in mind the following. If we find an alien race that at least as advanced as us, chances are, they're WAY ahead of us. This is a matter of probability, but we've only been transmitting for a few decades of our entire history and chances are any aliens out there have been doing it for, at the very least, thousands if not millions of years.
So, if you take the assumption that they're at least a few decades ahead of us, which is about 99.9999%, then they're going to have no problem deciphering patterns of numbers, as long as they're given some mathematical context within which to frame those patterns. That means raster images will be pretty simple for them to figure out. My guess is that they could feed it into some sort of uber-computer that would analyze the data and spit out an image (or a representation of the image) using whatever their sensory system is adapted to, sound, smell, visual, whatever.
Next, his AI computer idea is simply ridiculous. Again, you have to assume they're way ahead of us technologically. Any encryption we're likely to use to "protect" the data will likely be broken within a matter of seconds by them. Any programs we right will certainly be analyzed before they actually run them and they'll be able to get around any sort of software protection mechanisms we try to put in place.
Think about it. Take any program from 20 years ago. Is there any program from 20 years ago that some competent hacker today couldn't compromise within a matter of minutes, maybe hours? You think someone a few million years ahead of us is going to have any problem compromising our current encryption?
The only way to communicate with them is simply open communications. You start by providing a mathematical and logical basis and build from there. This guy may be a genius, but he doesn't seem to really understand the issues here and I'm no expert, but these are very obvious flaws.
Seriously, how hard is it to catch a story when it breaks? Besides, there are legal limits to how powerful of a signal you can send up. Interested customers would serve themselves better by continuing to chat with the aliens that regularly examine them with the anal probe thingy.
Laws are for people with no friends.
The thing is, the photon traveling through empty space is not a classically-forbidden energy state. There are no walls in outer space.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Why should we care if they read/write right to left or in columns? In the worst case, an image becomes mirrored in two directions (making a b into a p). But, in every code they decipher, it will look like that, making it a valid symbol and just as arbitrary as the one we use.
The ever-popular "solution to a problem that doesn't exist." Seriously, why would anyone be wasting time on figuring out how to communicate with aliens when we have NO PROOF that they even exist yet. Let's try spending a little more time figuring out how to stop killing each other first, k?
Make no mistake.
No system can be completely protected purely in software running on untrusted hardware.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I've always thought that instead of trying to send messages or whatever, a beacon would be the best bet. This is much more likely to draw a response, since curiosity is an inherent trait even in animals. A very large, very powerful laser emitting at an obviously artificial wavelength, like blue or green for example, could be mounted on a satellite, which could be set in a stationary orbit between Earth and the Sun, and could be set to rotate at a specific rate. This would produce a plainly artifical beacon that would travel fast, be very recognizable, and draw immediate response from a civilization capable of such communication. What we do after we get a response is another matter completely. I honestly don't believe we are ready for that as a species. We can't even communicate effectively with each other.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
I bet this is what would be sent.
"It appears likely that the only form of trade possible across interstellar distances is a trade in information, so sending out everything you know is like giving away all your assets to complete strangers. There aren't many humans who would do that, and I don't see why it should be different with aliens."
On the one hand, he talks about how the current SETI efforts are anthropomorphic and thus unsuitable but then he uses the above reasoning to justify his own solution? Worse, he gets it wrong. How does he explain the free software movement under this analogy?
His idea is not only anthropomorphic, it is decidedly old world thinking and representative of an early age of development. There is just as much reason to believe that any alien society capable of such communication feats would be beyond the bounds of limited resources and hence property.
You probably work for the Office Of Homeland Security, don't you?
Try John Cunningham Lilly, he was the scientist who swam with the dolphins on acid.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
nanu nanu
Oh wait, I'm the 103rd person to post that witty repost ! (or compost - something smells, anyway)
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Most messages start with simple math, then work their way up to geometry, physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, etc.
Even the klingons don't speak klingon, not since hte first few seasons of TNG. They just grunt out vaguely klingon-like sounds called "Paramount Hol" by those who care about such things...
He stole this idea from rudy rucker. in his *ware(freeware,realware, etc) books he writes about aliens that travel by broadcasting themselves out to the universe and waiting to get decoded and put into a computer/robot. pretty much the same thing and it came out in '97.
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.
There are some intellegent critters on Earth. Take whales.
How intellegent are they? Well, it's pretty hard to tell.
Do they use language? Er, we think so, but we're not sure what it means.
These animals are mammals like us. People can look them in the eye and sense a kind of recognition. Yet we still can't talk with them.
Now take an animal slightly more different from us, perhaps a reptile. Look that sucker in the eye and there is no real connection. Who the hell knows what he's thinking.
It seems to me that we have an awful tough time communicating with relatively intellegent creatures even when we've lived side by side for generations and understand each others' environment.
So if we were to find another civilization out there, its quite possible we could sit with them for 100 years and never know what each other is thinking.
Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird -- Proverbs 1:17
the technology even makes sure they move their mouths as though they were pronouncing words in English too..
That's because the translator is messing not only with the ears, but also with the eyes, that way, if you're deaf, you can still read on their lips...
put some iPods in space, go to relativistic speeds by using the reality distortion field and make some aliens happy (or put them into another ice age...)
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Just use PERL!
pr0n ... lots and lots of pr0n.
No sig for you!!
Of course, it also doesn't mean you might not be right, maybe we are the dummies of the universe, but I think it's more that some of you guys have been watching too much bad sci-fi tv. Go read some book sci-fi...it's a lot better, or at least a lot more thoughtful.
If life is so scarce in the universe, and the alien species was social and tool-making like us, I think they might be very curious about us. Undoubtedly if we ever get to the stars our xenobiologists will be fascinated by alien life. How that curiosity would interact with their social and cultural and political bonds, I don't know...they as a species might take a stance to ignore us much like the USA has decided to war in Iraq even though some citizens of the USA might not want that, but individualy...it should be interesting.
Alien life will probably be weird and wild, as their ancient ancient ancestors will have diverged, or risen independantly, from ours (their very cells may be very different), but all life is driven to reproduce, and you will have parallel behaviors that are understandable by us that help the alien life reproduce and carry on living. So it's not like everything will be uncomprehendable by mere human mortals. It will be different, yes. But not utterly beyond our comprehension like something god-like.
The biggest hurdle will be if their primary senses are ones we don't have...take some types of snakes--they have pits on their faces that sense heat. Our skin senses hot and cold, but not specifically. Or if their senses don't sense the same wavelengths as we do--ie, if they speak and hear vastly higher or lower sounds than we do, we might miss a few times before we realize that (or they might miss a few times with us) they are saying or hearing something. Same for vision--if they see infrared or ultraviolet instead of visible light, there will have to be some adjustments made to understand things. These are the way we take in information, and there are some very basic things built into all human societies around our specific senses and how much we rely on each one. It's not a stretch to think alien society will act in part based on their main senses and ways of taking in info from their environment.
But our scientists detect things they can't hear with their original senses unaided, using instruments to color-code things and record things they can't see or hear, so it's safe to say (I think) that alien society should be able to do the same, else they wouldn't be anywhere scientifically.
So...I guess I'm saying it's not as big a hurdle or problem as people think it will be. Alien life won't be some mystical voodoo like people are making out. (Seriously, lay off the sci-fi tv and think for yourselves.) There's a lot of factors to think about here, that would change depending on what sort of aliens you're trying to communicate with. But assuming that we are face-to-face with them, you just apply the scientific method. Or get some good animal behaviorists and human anthropologists to work together on it. The details will depend on the specific alien encounter.
I could say a lot more on this, I've not covered nearly everything that would be involved in this and have made broad assumptions that I know someone will pounce on saying, "Nuh uh! What if--", but whatever. :)
The aliens-as-gods thoughts were starting to annoy me.
(I just got a good idea for my sci-fi novel, though. Thanks, Slashdot!)
It matters little that there's no real information content. The information is not in the content. The information is in the fact the signal exists at all.
Carl Sagan used prime numbers as the "getting your attention" part of a signal by aliens, in his novel "Contact". (If you've only ever seen the movie, the book is actually better in many ways.) I'm sure plenty of others have described the same method.
Actually, any alien worth their salt wouldn't bother with such primitive methods of detecting intelligent life. What you need is a radio telescope aray about 1 mile in diameter. This would give you a resolution high enough to see an Earth-sized planet at a distance of 1 AU from its sun, at a distance of 100 light-years with a resolution of about 2x2 pixels.
That would be ample for you to look at the absorbtion frequencies of the atmosphere. Each molecule absorbs a unique frequency. Both life and industry generate large quantities of highly unstable molecules, so by looking at the absorbtion pattern it should be possible to determine the extent of life and whether it has developed an industrial base.
Once a planet with life and industry is located, you then simply start scanning frequencies for non-random signals. At this point, Earth fails the test and they move on*.
*NASA actually carried out the experiment and that really is the result they got.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If I were an alien species that studied humans for a while I would come to the conclusion that I'd have been better off if someone said to me at the beginning, "Move along."
No sig for you!!
If an advanced species exists (perhaps one example in our own solar system), then it is likely given the size of the universe that another does, and another, and so on. At some point, it seems to me, some of these advanced critters may have met and decided on a method of communication across the stars.
And so, I would expect communications of the "sub-space" sort must be all around us. We just need to find the right medium to tune in to. My internal conclusion was that this medium is probably very saturated with information, and we are probably bombarded with it daily, completely taken for granted as natural phenomena.
I don't think our space neighbors will be chatting to their gallatic buddies at 100 million years per line.
Marques Johansson
Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.
The parent AC gives an example that should have been in TFA.
$end Th3 ME55A9E 1N LEet 5pe4K! 1+ wOrk$ iN W0W
0x461FAB0BD7D2
useless drivel Send AI to the aliens !! Here is an answer for any question out there Answer it with a solution that you don't know how to construct answer a question with another question!!!
He who has the code and the data has the full power.
One problem I have with our attempts to communicate and listen for alien signals - what are the chances of a sufficiently advanced space-faring civilization still using the radio spectrum? Using radio to communicate may probably be the equivalent of semaphores to an advanced civilization.
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.
Education is the silver bullet.
Maybe mark the envelope "For The Aliens" on the outside -- so humans wouldn't accidentally take it.
Tell me again, who knew Mary was a virgin, and how did they know?
Rings a bell, I suspect it could be one of Van Vogt's. I'll check my book of his short stories when I get home tonight; if I'm right, I'll post a followup.
I remember that story too! I dont remember the title, but Im pretty sure it was written by Robert Sheckley
Great satirist and pre-cyberpunk writer!
'Alien intelligence'
What does that mean? For example, whales or dolphins in the ocean that communicate with clicks and sub-audio rumbles that we don't understand as communication?
Communication with intelligence not from this planet? There is no evidence that this kind of intelligence exists, outside of science fiction, so is it a rhetorical question as to how to communicate with it.
Or, - the only real aliens that we seriously need to communicate with. Getting your truck stopped at gunpoint in the third world (like the on Baghdad - Mosul road or 200 kilometers south of Lima) and trying to convince the bunch of cold, wide-eyed 18-year-olds with AK-47s NOT to just kill you and leave your body off the side of the road.
Especially when they speak some language that you've never heard of and don't consider you to be a human being anyway.
This is the only situation where 'alien' communication skills becomes a matter of importance. It's the kind of thing that Americans should learn in school, instead of Algebra. After all, you are a lot more likely in the future to be held at gunpoint by the side of the road by 'aliens' than you are to ever use algebra.
I think the key is that pet-keeping is strong evidence of intelligence, but not per se proof of the trait. Just like seeing a red house is strong evidence that it was painted red, it isn't proof on its own that the house actually is painted red because the lighting might be chromatic, you may be viewing it through a filter, your definition of "red" might not be correct, or any number of other causes may interfere with your ability to ascertain the truth of the statement "That house is painted red."
Keeping a pet is evidence of intelligence, but it takes more to prove the trait, including proof that keeping a pet is an activity undertaken only by intelligent beings. The science fiction story referred to by the ancestor comment only says that the superior race opened lines of communication after witnessing the evidence of human intelligence in the form of keeping a pet mouse. Surely the communication itself eventually would prove or disprove that intelligence.
By the same token, the inability to spell "intelligence" and "gorilla" or to appropriately capitalize the latter and punctuate a sentence suggesting that the former is a trait of the latter is itself only evidence of unintelligence. It would take more to prove it.
"Vector images are made up of many individual, scalable objects. These objects are defined by mathematical equations rather than pixels.", if I may quote a website that speaks about Vector graphics. The important part here to note is that vector images on a computer are feasable because the computer has, readily available, direct access to those equations and objects.
So is the author implying that aliens are performing complex mathematics to generate the equations to produce these images on the fly? If they have access to the information that they need to begin turning what they see into vector images, they already have the information that they need to generate visual data directly. I highly doubt that this concept of some kind of naturally evolved vector graphics computation in the minds of some species is (A) feasable or (B) practical. Practicality rules it out on a Darwinian level, and feasability rules it out because it just doesn't make sense.
The truth is that the visual images we see are not "calculated" in any of the ways that the author describes. We don't work like a computer, because we have a system that processes it much more effectively. Our neural network is reading the impulses of light that reflect off of object directly (through use of our eyes). It doesn't make sense to describe that information in terms of "bitmaps" or "vectors", and it would be bizzare and unnatural for any species to perform additional computation on that light data just so that it can fit into our strange and human-made notion of computer graphics.
-Vendal Thornheart
A for Andromeda
I think the "sufficiently advanced minds" that Suso refers to will see the human race's ultimate value to them as being:
;)
A.) A fun family pet to keep in a cage.
B.) A lifeform to conduct scientific and/or medical experiments on to advance knowledge which will be of benefit to them.
C.) Tasty food.
See? Aliens aren't so different from us after all.
But this comment may fall into the off-topic catagory of: "What do we not want to hear?"
Bah weep granna weep ninny bah! (errrr... not responsible for bad memory, bad pronunciation or bad anything else, but you get the idea.)
The beauty of trading information with a distant alien race is:
1.Information is free to copy, so there is no cost to sending real information.
2.If you cheat and send fake info they might cut you off, even if you send real info later.
3.They are so far away it can almost never hurt you to tell them what you know, since even if they were inclined they couldn't hurt you.
4.They will know the above because however bad their system of government/whatever they have to decide what to transmit, however bad it is, it has to be better than ours. This isn't really that much of a suprise if you happen to know that we have the worst possible of all governments, the kind that is willing to build weapons that can kill virtually everyone on the planet, then only take half hearted measures to prevent insane nations from developing them. It becomes obvious why there are no alien signals when it is possible to build something so destructive with basic rudiments of technology.
So this idea, besides being really stupid and solving nothing, is even more anthropomorphic than sending images (which are 2 dimensional patterns, which any being which can move in at least 2 dimensions can be safely able to abstractly comprehend if worth talking to). It solves nothing because the AI still has to talk to them somehow, so back to square one.
We can't even have a proper conversation with the animals of this planet, where we are supposedly many orders of magnitude more intelligent... what makes us think we can effectively communicate with anyone outside of humans?
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
Giant Space Dildoes with Frickin Lasers in their foreheads? The 50's just don't go away, do they?
Who is John Cabal?
Nanoo, Nanoo!
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Humans are animals.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
I sure hope someone figures out how to talk to aliens sometime soon. I keep asking the IT guys to fix my computer, but I've not yet gotten a response.
Get a remote-controlled robot and have it fixed from India.
Table-ized A.I.
they only talk Macintosh
Table-ized A.I.
I dont have an extensive knowledge of how this works, but I have read that you can entangle two particles with the same "spin" or properties, then if one particle is observed, it will automatically change the other particle. Would it be possible to seal one entangled particle in a probe and send it out with a solar sail for propulsion, and keep the other entangled twin here? We could periodically check the status of the particle, and when we observe it change states from our observation, we would know that it's twin had been observed.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
It would be funny if aliens considered reruns of I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners as pr0n, don't you think?
If that's the case, we'll only hear from them if we stop broadcasting the shows!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
That works for me. Whenever I encounter someone from a different country or culture, I talk real slow and loudly and leave out every third word and gesture a lot. It seems to work, so I figure extraterrestrial aliens will be the same.
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
As far as communicating with other species, we really suck. Really suck bad. We haven't learned to communicate with a single other species on this planet. Those we do communicate learned to communicate with US. Seriously, chimps, gorillas, hell, your average Golden Retriever has learned to communicate with US, not the other way around. Even my dog is better at it than we are. My dog understand some 15 or so words at least. I havent figured out a single damn bark/growl/whine yet. Not with any specificity. So, maybe the aliens have looked at us and decided we aren't capable of communicating with them, and so...don't even want to bother. Maybe we just can't for some biological or developemental reason.
""I don't see an obvious biosynthetic pathway from allicin (CH2=CHCH2SS(=O)CH2CH=CH2)to isothiocyanates (R-N=C=S) ""
theme in "Contact" is still the best way of
;-)
communicating (one-way) with alien civilizations
via C (the speed, not the language).
Transmit "I Love Lucy", or whatever, using your
current method of choice (RF, UHF, X-Rays) to
get their attention. Then broadcast a message
with the blueprints of the neatest/scariest stuff
you can.
If they can decipher the primer, the grad students
can do the rest. However, it may take a few eons
before we receive a reply, or friendly visit
I think our best hope is to send Von Neumann probes in a couple of directions; 'smart', self-replicating machines that, upon arival and after 'reproduction' using native resources, establish themselves on the moons of the various planets of the systems, sending out signal pulses and waiting to be discovered by a native species. (like the monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Until we're able to create such machines, though, I guess we'll just have to broadcast stuff and hope someone cares and can make sense of it all.
Fox can take the sky from you.
We broadcast spam to billions of nodes and we don't even have a firewall to protect us from a DOS attack on service Earth.
We could take a tip from the Andaman Islanders, believed to be alive and well because they fired bows and arrows at the helicopters used by the US millitary in the Tsunami rescue work.
They resisted all contact, and eventually traded some socialogical information for food. Apparently when pig is plentiful they eat pig, and when pig is scarce they fish. Now that has to be worth a mango.
I think the trade idea is interesting, but if they are so far removed direct contact is unlikely, then by withholding information that might be socially useful to them might be seen as selfish.
i.e. if they withhold the cure for cancer for 50 years, till we tell them the secret of teflon, would we look on them lovingly, after they have traded us the prints for the new inter-stellar drive?
guns. Yes lets just start shooting up the place once we meet them. I mean hell if we shoot up our own kind so much, what makes us think that a species that defies most religious ideas and peoples morals are going to change that. It may be a couple weeks, but most likely (probably 99% odds) we would engage in war because of the religious fanatics. I mean the leader of the wealthiest and most weapon-stocked nation in the world strictly believes in his religious teachings. And we thought a lot of innocent lives were lost in the crusades...
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
The argument in TFA is to send the details of a trading machine out so that the other civ can build it. If anyone has read (or old enough like me to have seen the TV series) A For Andromeda this tells of the receipt of a message with designs for a computer, the same scenario is played out in detail. Its purpose is not revealed, it is assumed it is here to help, but there are sinister overtones. The story is never about black and white issues, always trying to guess the motivations of an alien civilisation. An extremely good story about SETI. Then imagine that the details are not received by us but by someone else, how much will THEY trust the machine. Will it have ulterior motives.
Bitter and proud of it.
There is a completely different approach to pictoral messages, which I think is actually much more promising. Instead of trying to communicate by drawing pictures, it just consists of a sequence of symbols indicating different concepts and ideas, starting with basic mathematics and moving its way on up. A great deal of repetition and examples are used, with cross-referencing and more generalized examples, in order to help make the meaning clear. Freudenthal put this together in a book called Lincos .
As a flagship example, and then offered with no explanation whatsoever to a group of volunteers who tried to decipher it. Given that the alien civilization that was modeled here was quite different from our own, it is surprising how much of the message was deciphered by the participants. (Oh, and Lincos-like messages can easily encode pictoral-type messages in themselves, just as the Contact Project showed.)
It's an intriguing idea, but this guy clearly thinks software is magical. Specifically, he misinterprets the Church-Turing thesis to mean that aliens will have no trouble running our software. That's wrong.
Church and Turing say that it's possible to write an emulator for any computer to run on any other computer (modulo stuff like performance and storage). That doesn't mean that there's anything universal about how we represent our programs.
He also proposes the rather silly idea that the negotiation AI basically use DRM to keep the aliens from finding its secrets. If the program contains encrypted data that it can decrypt, the aliens can decrypt it too, simply by watching how the program decrypts the data.
That being said, I have to add that it's an interesting idea. CPU opcodes have nice, well-defined behaviour and it may be easier to communicate their meanings than something more abstract. Also, a working computer program would certainly be better at some kinds of communication such as, e.g., the chess program he mentioned.
On the other hand, suppose you've sent them a program that negotiates an information trade. How would they know that the program is negotiating a trade and not, say, just a more boring SimCity clone?
We may be able to communicate by software but I don't know if that can extend to sentient-being communication.
You are referring to Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut.
The idea of sending an AI to communicate with aliens, or communicating with alien AIs that we received, is exactly the same as what Gregory Benford wrote in "Hydrogen Wall" in Asimov's SF Magazine, Oct/Nov 2003. A review of which can be found here. Trading some information for some other information is but a minor task of those alien AIs: they have much grander motivations, which you wouldn't expect until near the end of the story. That's a great story, in fact one of the best hard science fiction stories I've read in recent years. I wonder if John Nunn has heard about the story somewhere, do did he come up with this idea independently?
Just send Cortana and Guilty Spark.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The moment we started testing atomic bombs is the moment we really started to see in influx of UFOs and even the Roswell event. I can only suspect that converting sythetic mass (Plutonium cannot be found in nature) to energy caused a unique signature at the quantum level. Basically, it acted as a beacon that could have been picked up instantly by some Alien technology hundreds of light years away.
Rumor has it, because India and Pakistan detonated their bombs, we have yet another influx of UFO activity.
Strange, bazzare, and even FUD. But interesting none the less.
Life is not for the lazy.
Every time I post a craigslist ad I broadcast to outerspace. guess I should build some better AI into my posts before I go soliciting aliens. : p
Unfortunately this reportedly amazing mathematical mind has been completely contaminated by the corporate twitspeak of the richest man of the late 20th century.
To imagine that a culture most likely hundreds of thousands to millions of years older than us would 1) have trouble deciphering a bitmap, 2) be happy to get a copy of Clippy with DRM, or 3) think generously toward us after that, is so stupid I think you have to wonder how many minds this patenting/copyrighting/EULAing/lawyering culture has utterly warped and destroyed.
An AI might be useful, especially if we have a starship we need one to drive it. Maybe to figure out how to talk to them and plead our case (better be a good AI, might be more of a human personality in silicon, no?). Aliens might be interested in what we look like and our concepts/works of beauty, maybe interstellar photographs from where we are, or measurements of physical constants here. Maybe just because there are not that many intelligent species in the galaxy. But they do not want to be given a copy-protected CD, they certainly can crack it, and the notion offered by this "grandmaster" is probably the MOST POISONOUS one you could possibly send to outer space. Hope instead they send us an AI and we can figure it out.
Honestly this guy is terminally ridiculous. Of course the idea of an AI itself isn't dumb, it's been in science fiction enough. Trying to think of useful things to trade isn't dumb either. It is the utter egotism the rest of the article displays. Reason enough for a punitive gamma ray burst nearby maybe too!
It is simply a matter of accepting it. Much like when a subject comes up that the "superior" mind has prejudiced opinions about, certain "truth" is missed. So, too, we will miss anything trying to communicate to us that is outside our determined sphere of beliefs. The harder you look, the more it proves you are missing the obvious...
Once a planet with life and industry is located, you then simply start scanning frequencies for non-random signals. At this point, Earth fails the test and they move on*.
...
Heh. Actually, an interesting paper on the topic was published in Science back in January 1978. You probably need a subscription to read it. The title is "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth" by W.T.Sullivan III, S.Brown, C.Wetherill. Maybe I should nab a copy of the paper and put it online somewhere
To summarize, they considered the radio signal of Earth as it would appear to a remote radio astronomer listening in at various latitudes. They assumed that no content could be decoded; only the radio spectrum was measurable. The idea was that the aliens had technology roughly comparable to our own, and could record our signal over time, and analyze it. They calculated that the spectrum of several hundred of our broadcast stations could be reliably measured out to at least 25 light years, and 250 light years for the military radar.
Their conclusions were interesting. For example, the usual doppler effects, plus knowing the size and mass of the sun, gave the Earth's orbit and the fact that we have a large satellite.
But the fun part is based on the fact that our strong radio signals (military radar and commercial television) are strongly directional, with most of the energy going out horizontally. So the remote astronomers would receive mostly signal from the Earth's limb. Broadcasts use narrow frequencies, so a particular station would appear in the spectrum very briefly and fade. 12 hours later, most of them would reappear, slightly doppler shifted up or down. Then 24 hours later (23:56 actually), the original frequency would appear. They now know our rotation period, and from the amount of the doppler shift, the planet's radius can be calculated. This will depend on the station's latitude, of course, and the max is the actual radius of the planet.
Over a period of a year, a collection of the broadcast stations can be collected, and when they are detected gives their longitude. We know latitudes from the doppler shifts. So we have a rough map of the broadcast stations. One thing that stands out in this map is that the planet has two kinds of surfaces, and almost all the stations are on the smaller of these. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, we infer that it's a world with liquid water. The fixed positions of the stations (determined over several years) tells us that the stations are on land, which is roughly 1/4 of the planet's surface; the other surface is ocean. The stations are clustered strongly on the boundary, so the planet's advanced species is a land animal that likes to live near ocean shores.
To quote a summary paragraph:
After several years of careful monitoring of the intensity and frequency variations of several hundred stations, the observer could deduce (i) the complete orbit of the earth; (ii) the existence of station broadcast schedules influenced by the sun; (iii) the presence of an ionosphere and perhaps even a troposphere; (iv) the size, rotation rate, and axis of rotation of the earth; (v) a complete map of the stations; (vi) the mass and distance of the moon; (vii) the size of the radiating antennas; and (viii) various cultural inferences concerning our civilization.
It's an interesting read. I wonder if anyone has done a similar study since then? Google finds 21 matches for the article's title, but they all seem to be bibliographic references. It could be interesting to dig into some of the matches and see what else turns up.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Therefore, logic dictates that the large-brained bipeds whom we shall inevitably meet will *probably* use some form of this, and we must quickly adapt, or risk being seem as 'inhuman' (so to speak.)
As the Mals say, "No scents; nonsense."
(Fortunately, humans possess an adult sub-group that is uncannily attuned to scent: I refer to the "schizophrenics". Their sensitivity to odor is well-documented. Let's make sure we have a few on board every spaceship that goes out there. Seriously.)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.