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."

Comments

And it was

[2.7182]

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Re:Wishful thinking

[PopeOptimusPrime]

If this transmission stimulates even one young person to do that calculation for themselves, or to otherwise conclude that it's a foolish waste of money, it will have been money well spent.

Practical joke

[dachshund]

Without any context --- e.g., our biochemistry, amino acid structure, nature of DNA --- this message amounts to about the worst practical joke in the history of interstellar communication. It has a relatively non-random structure, so clearly must mean something, and yet they'll never figure it out.

Re:Wishful thinking

[ZorbaTHut]

Useless, perhaps, but not technically impossible.

The entire Wikipedia section on the production of titanium is a little under 4 kilobytes, which would take a bit over an hour to transmit at those rates. Imagine an alien species has a new ultra-efficient titanium refining process - would you wait a day to get the summary of it downloaded for your scientists? I sure as hell would.

The two-hundred-year transmission lag to go a hundred lightyears is a far bigger issue than the bandwidth.

The message was so lame

[b1t r0t]

So if you're going to send a message, you have to choose one. What did he choose? The DNA sequence for an enzyme.

We used Apple's "Speak" option to vocalize the phonetic code which I then recorded on my iPhone. Here is a fragment of the total message, the whole of which can be decoded unambiguously into the gene for RuBisCo:

Tell me how, exactly, the recipient is going to decode a DNA sequence, even if the basic message can be identified as strings of 2-bit numbers? Not only is DNA specific (as far as we know) to Earth chemistry, but the meanings of the codons, and even the choice to interpret them in triplets is the result of chance evolution on this planet. It's like sending a message in Navajo to Paris, with the assumption that it can be "decoded unambigiously"... because the sender knew what it meant. The meanings of DNA codons are absolutely not a universal constant like binary math is.

knowyourself riddleoflife amthe riddleoflife amthe amthe riddleoflife riddleoflife

<facepalm> Not that the choice of words would mean anything to them, but this shows the touchy-feely-ness that goes along with the lack of foresight that was already demonstrated.

Say what you will about Sagan's message, but at least they put some thought into making a message that gave hints as to how to decode it, rather than just sending some unframed binary mish-mash.