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After 35 Years, Another Message Sent From Arecibo
0xdeadbeef writes "Two weeks ago, MIT artist-in-residence Joe Davis used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message to three stars in honor of the 35th anniversary of the famous Drake-Sagan transmission to M13 in 1974. It was apparently allowed but not endorsed by the director of the facility, and used a jury-rigged signal source on what will now be known as the 'coolest iPhone in the world.' The message encoded a DNA sequence, but no word yet on whether it disabled any alien shields. You can get the low-down on Centauri Dreams: Part 1, Part 2."
Why is it that some guy is taking the liberty to send anything he pleases to the aliens?
I mean, if we're going to seriously entretain the idea that some day some other civilization might receive the message, then such things should be planned carefully to be as meaningful, easily decodable and as non-threatening as possible lest it bite us in the ass some day. That excludes random people with access to the hardware sending messages just because they can out of their own initiative.
Just for a start, iPhone text to speech? There has to be some better way to encode a DNA sequence that would more obvious to decode that machine-generated voice in a human language.
And, if we're not really taking this seriously and this is just a gimmick, why bother in the first place? Surely there has to be some better use of the equipment.