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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."
SHOUT A WHOLE LOT. It makes you easier to understand.
first post.
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.
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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?
...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.
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.
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Carousel is a lie!
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.
Perhaps they saw a certain goat-related website, and all the anal-probing is just them trying to say "Hello".
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
I always thought that curiosity and scientific advancement went hand in hand. If these aliens are so advanced, then wouldn't they be inclined to be curious about other species?