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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."
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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.
We are very tasty snacks! Here, have our DNA, and grow some appetizers for the long journey!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
We could never pick up a radio signal from an alien civilization because the power of a signal from a point source drops off exponentially..
Umm..... its not a "point source" its a spherical reflector..... the whole point of the construction of big antennas is to allow you to do precisely what it is you friend appears to believe is impossible.
We now return you to your usual /. chaos
-jon
Actually I believe calculations have been done which show that two Arecibo type telescopes could communicate across the galaxy.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Except that Alpha Centauri's staggeringly advanced "alien" technology has solved this problem long, long ago.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Do you have a blog where you publish these calculations, etc?
This would be a great article for popular science, etc.
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.
Dear citizens of Centauri. I have a large sum of gold, 300 metric tons, I need to move off planet. If you'll deposit a small transfer fee, 3 metric tons of gold, in a local bank I will make arrangements to ship the gold to you. Signed crowned prince of Iowa.
These guys must be loaded. Would you believe the rates they're charging for interstellar calls?
Pretty sure the power drops off with an inverse square law.
Exponential != really fast. It's really really really really fast, eventually.
Oddly, we just solved this problem in E&M class. If you had antennas with 80 dBi gain at both ends and a megawatt of power, that would be sufficient to transmit 10^5 bits per second over a lightyear gap with a received power level above the thermal noise floor (e.g. the antenna does enough work on the receiver to flip a bit). Raise the distance to 100 lightyears and reduce the gain to 73 dBi (e.g. Arecibo) and you lose 5.5 orders of magnitude in bit rate. Up the power to three megawatts (not hard to imagine) and you get back half an order of magnitude. So the achievable rate over 100ly using only current Earth technology at both ends is about a bit per second. Useless, perhaps, but not technically impossible.
Not to mention the fact that even point source radiation falls off as the inverse square of the distance, which isn't at all the same thing as falling off exponentially.
Not really. College professors force young people to do similar calculations already.
One bit per second is good enough for the Navy...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This just in - they got a response:
Dear Earthling,
Hello! I am a creature from a galaxy far away, visiting your planet.
I have transformed myself into this text file. As you are reading it, I
am having sex with your eyeballs. I know you like it because you are
smiling. Please pass me on to someone else because I'm really horny.
Ok, I understand the "coolness" factor of radio transmissions to the stars, but in the end are they all wasted money? I mean, chances are another Hubble mixed with other probes can find where there is other life faster, quicker and easier than radio telescopes. We've been trying these for ages and they haven't picked up anything. So why not spend research money doing things that we know are going to work. Plus, its a whole lot more probable that we will find non-intelligent life throughout the universe than intelligent life. Even if we find life outside earth with the technology level of 1700s earth, they won't be picking up these signals and really for all but the last 100 years, humans wouldn't have been able to pick up this signal. So quit messing around with radio signals and find possible planets for life.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You have no idea about what you are talking about. It is true that omni directional radio sources are subject to inverse square law, but directional signals degrade less slowly. Scientists have calculated that using the Arecibo dish at one megawatt the signal could be received by a similarly sized dish 10000 lightyears away. I think I trust calculations done by people with PhDs in astronomy more than calculations done by you and your friend
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.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Considering that your transmission is going to take a hundred years to get there in the first place, 1 bit per second wouldn't be all that bad.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I'ma let you finish, but we already got a reply to the original message!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
sorry, no. It drops potentially.
We could have rickrolled them so they could get a taste of our culture!
Sending out a DNA sequence assumes that the receiver understands a great deal about our planet and the molecular basis of life on it.
Think about it, even if they understood the message was about DNA, they would have to know our amino acid code in order to interpret it as the template for a protein. A protein that either did not evolve on their world, or evolved in a completely different way.
In effect, all we saying with this message is that we have advanced enough to recognize that DNA is the basis for life on this planet. Only a sentience that already understood that basis could interpret this message.
It's akin to someone shouting, "a-squared + b-squared = c-squared!" - out-of-context - in the antarctic. It shows you have learned something, but there either isn't anyone to hear you or they won't understand you unless they knew all about you (and Euclidian geometry) already.
In 35 years, we will get back "whogot votedoff AmericanIdol lastweek?"
It's all damned lies and statistics!! I mean 47% of all people use statistics to back up their arguments.
My Dear Friend and Earthling, My name is Mr. Zebel Braumat, I am a senior priest in the highest order of our race. We are conducting a standard process investigation/Recommendation on behalf of all Advanced Common Civilization (ACC). This investigation involves an ancient race who shares similar DNA as with yours from which we have previously received messages from. The circumstances which surrounding investments made by this race at ADB Gold Account, the Private Banking arm of ACC. The ACC Private Banking client died intestate and nominated no successor in title over the investments made with the bank amounting to over galactic 9.5 Gazillion dollars. The essence of this communication with you is to request that you provide us information/comments on any or all of the four issues as regards nominating your race to inherit the fund left behind by this previous race. You are therefore being contacted to be legally nominated as next of kin(inheritor) to this race after all enquiries and investigation has yielded results showing that there is no known successors. You are required therefore to answer this questions to enable us make our recommendation. 1-Are you aware of any relative/relation born on the 2nd of February 1951, who shares your same name whose last known contact address was West Africa? 2-Are you aware of any investment of considerable value made by such a person at the Private Banking Division of ADB Bank PLC? 3-Can you confirm your willingness to accept this inheritance if you are legally and legitimately nominated and approved to stand as inheritor to this huge investment in regards to the bank account with ADB? 4-Would you agree to donate part of this inheritance to charity if you are officially approved to stand as the inheritor? It is pertinent that you inform us ASAP whether or not you are familiar with this personality or and your interest towards the issues mentioned. You must appreciate that we are constrained from providing you with more detailed information at this point. Please respond to this mail as soon as possible to afford us the opportunity to provide you with more information on this investigation and recommendation. Thank you for accommodating our enquiry. Mr. Zebel Braumat For: Advanced Common Civilization Kappa Ceti (G5B)
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.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Or, you could watch GoldenEye.
Also, for those that are not visually impaired, a Satellite View (2.6MB) and an Airplane View (3.5 MB)
it's like a radio time capsule.
Imagine if what becomes of humans in 1 million years or so intercept the transmission. It would be like digging up an old fossil record of DNA.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
So the reason why noone has heard us, is not because noone is out there, but is because our technology for interstellar communication still sucks.
Oddly enough that makes me feel much better about the chances of finding someone out there....eventually.
There's an app for that!
Not in my lifetime.
Radio waves aren't made out of photons?
I know the paernt is a FAKE because it's not all in caps.
But they did use an iPhone.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
+3 Interesting, huh?
This (and some previous, as well as some following) comments, have absolutely no clue whatsoever about E&M radiation. If you don't know, don't post.
The strength of electromagnetic radiation drops off as the square of distance. (As long as you're far enough away to ignore "near-field effects", which for the astronomical distances we are talking about, they can very well be ignored.)
It is always the square of the distance no matter what antenna geometry, gain, feed, or other technological measure is employed. It is not exponential (as stated by a previous post). They do not degrade "less slowly" as stated in the parent post. (And - "less slowly" - does that mean they degrade more faster?)
I swear, I hardly ever post here, but I'm going to have to create an account just so I can reply to all the erroneous understandings of E&M that get modded up. I expected this readership to be better than that.
That was a tough lesson in dream dispersal.
Did you read the comments on that dude's blog?
I'd have added some of my own, but I just didn't have the heart.
Ouch.
-FL
Now that Pluto is no longer a planet, why is it still included in the message? Shouldn't they be sending an updated version?
Given that we didn't beam out the Wikipedia article for the first message, I'm going to try and anticipate what the alien civilization will see it as by deciphering it myself without reading the article first:
"From top to bottom, the word 'aliens' in white English letters, a purple rock, some Space Invaders, a man with a giant blue head and a staff to his right, some white noise, and a bunch of stars over Planet GMail."
"stimulates even one young person to do that calculation for themselves" != "force young people to do similar calculations"
Being interested in science and doing things because you want to is very different from just doing it because you have to to pass the class you're taking because you have to.
Exactly. I don’t think the phone model would have been mentioned (and with a wink nonetheless) that way if it were another phone.
Besides: Even a iPhone that sent stuff to another planet and got a reply, can’t beat a Linux running Nokia N900 with built-in full root access, from a company whose phones had SSH terminal software available for more than seven years now. </proper-geek-fanboyism> ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Have you been blinded by your cell phone lately?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Not in my lifetime.
But maybe mine. I plan on living to be at least 500, hopefully more. So far, so good.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
No. The signal strength is 1/(r^2). Exponentially would be 1/(c^r), where c is some constant and r is the radius. Exponentially means r is in the exponent, not the base.
Just give it up, she's, er I mean they, are just not interested in you.
My sig is better than your sig.
Not in my lifetime.
But maybe mine. I plan on living to be at least 500, hopefully more. So far, so good.
How long have you lived so far?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Dear Earthling,
I have been requested by the Inter Planetary Resource Foundation to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. The Inter Planetary Resource Foundation has recently concluded a large number of contracts for resource exploration in the Alpha Centauri region. The contracts have immediately produced moneys equalling $40,000,000 in your currency. The Inter Planetary Resource Foundation is desirous of resource exploration in other parts of the galaxy, however, because of certain regulations of the Galactic council, it is unable to move these funds to another region.
Your assistance is requested to assist the Inter Planetary Resource Foundation in moving these funds out of the region. If the funds can be transferred to your name, in your Earthling bank account, then you can forward the funds as directed by the Inter Planetary Resource Foundation . In exchange for your accomodating services, the Inter Planetary Resource Foundation would agree to allow you to retain 10%, or US$4 million of this amount.
However, to be a legitimate transferee of these moneys according to Nigerian law, you must presently be a depositor of at least US$100,000 in a bank which is regulated by the Inter Planetary Resource Foundation.
If it will be possible for you to assist us, we would be most grateful. Please reply to this message at your earliest convenience.
We have no idea if the receiver is friendly. Based on human behavior, we can roughly guess that at least 10% of any/all intelligent receivers will be agressive. Why broadcast our location with those odds? It's not logical.
Table-ized A.I.
Arguing over inverse square law aside, is the 10,000 figure generally correct?
Table-ized A.I.
Even if we make the assumption of organic life, which isn't far-fetched given all of the awesome self-organizing things organic molecules (biotic or abiotic) can do, we have as yet no reason to assume that nucleic acids will be the information carrier in an alien life form. Even if we do assume that nucleic acids are the information carrier, we have no reason to assume that the genetic code is universal.
The evolution of the genetic code is perhaps the biggest mystery in the origins of life on Earth. We are only just beginning to set down a reasonable framework in which to put forth testable hypotheses, but still yet have no way of determining whether the genetic code as it evolved on Earth is the only thermodynamically favorable outcome for such a system, or if it was a fixed accident. There has been some interesting mathematical treatment of the evolution of the genetic code, but nothing conclusive on the mechanisms of its origins. It does seem that molecular biology and studies of molecular evolution are coming into their own in this respect, so answers may not be so many years off, but we still have quite a way to go in our understanding.
Considering that the genetic code itself is somewhat evolvable (there are a couple of organisms, bacteria IIRC, that have reassigned one of their duplicate codons for a 21st amino acid), there really isn't any good reason to assume that alien life forms, even if biochemically similar in most other respects, would have the same genetic code. For all we know, we may have just sent off a good bit of nonsense (genetically speaking), even if they could decode the sequence and understand it as a nucleic acid sequence.
It seems to me that it would make much more sense to send something mathematical: a sequence of primes, a Fibonacci sequence, or some other sequence that would never appear as a "natural" unintelligent signal. Something like that would be an unmistakable sign of intelligent life (at least intelligent enough to work out math and send it in a signal). Sending a genetic code seems like a complete waste of time (disregarding those who think that sending any kind of signal is a waste of time).
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
But *why* is it still the square of the distance when I always thought that was just a natural consequence of the increase in volume of a sphere as it's radius increases? If antenna gain makes no difference, then why bother with it at all?
As it is a linear partial differential equation, all solutions to the wave equation and equations of its type are governed by what is known as the "fundamental solution" or "Green's function" of the equation. In the case of wave type equations(in 3 or more dimensions), this solution will be a delta function type solution which decreases inversely with distance from the source. Squaring its amplitude to obtain energy gives an inverse square energy decrease.
It must be stressed that all solutions of the wave equation, no matter what the sources, or boundary or initial conditions, must all be functions derived, more or less, from convolutions of the fundamental solution with the source terms. You cannot escape the inverse square behaviour of wave propagation over long distances with finite wave sources. The fundamental solution characterises all waves because of the linearity of the wave equation.
Now, there is a second fundamental solution for the wave equation; the so called "acausal" Green's function, which represents an inwardly collapsing wave, or by some conventions, a wave travelling backwards through time. Naturally, these waves are not considered in the context of the transmission of signals. Even if they were, these waves also display and inverse square relation for signal strength( going backwards in time of course).
This has been your daily mathematical public service announcement. Complaints to be directed to the Dean.
May the Maths Be with you!
In the science fiction story "Dragons Egg" by Robert L Forward (who was incidentally a physics professor and described the book as "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel"), a spaceship beams the entire contents of their encyclopedia to creatures living on the surface of a neutron star at high speed. By the time they are halfway through, several hundred generations have passed and the creatures have solved all the problems that remain to be sent, have built spaceships of their own and are knocking on the hull. One of my favourite books ever, describing the postive viewpoint of giving knowledge away for free.
There are negative viewpoints though, such as presented by Gregory Benford (also a physics prof, and another of my favourite authors) where broadcasting anything attracts the attention of machines whose only purpose is to destroy organic life.
I'm not sure which theory is more likely to be proved. I would prefer the first (and I release my own code under the BSD licence) but I'm afraid that it only takes one civilisation to construct self-replicating terminators that could take over the galaxy at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Furthermore, since we only have one civilisation to study and our usual response seems to have been "We come in peace, shoot to kill" I'm not desperately confident for the long term future of the human race. After all, it doesn't seem likely that we are the first..
Not volume. Surface area. What is the amount of energy passing through some unit area in a unit of time. Google flux. For a sphere, the area increase as r^2. Double the distance and you have 1/4 the flux. The point of a big dish is to intercept more of the flux, and to get better angular resolution.
I'm not sure that giving knowledge away for free was really promoted there. The humans did give away knowledge, and in the end it worked out but for a time it started a lot of shit.
And then at the end of Dragon's Egg, the now-vastly-more-advanced aliens don't actually return the favour to the humans. Not directly, anyway: they leave the secrets in places that can only be accessed once the secret has already been discovered, basically so humans can check their work when they catch up.
On the other hand, it also only takes one civilization to construct self-replicating peacekeepers that could defend the galaxy at a significant fraction of the speed of light. And if those self-replicating terminators already exist, well, we're fucked as it is, so we may as well get it over with quickly.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if we are the first, or at least, the first with a good shot at reaching an interstellar society within our galaxy, simply based on the fact that any species that goes interstellar will probably expand at nearly the speed of light after doing so. The mere fact that our earth hasn't been colonized yet indicates that there may not be any interstellar species within our light cone.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I guess that rules out Quake then...
But *why* is it still the square of the distance when I always thought that was just a natural consequence of the increase in volume of a sphere as it's radius increases? If antenna gain makes no difference, then why bother with it at all?
Because although the covered area is much smaller, it still grows quadratically with distance (there simply is no such thing as an exactly parallel beam). The antenna makes a difference in that you get a higher signal in the desired direction to begin with. If your signal is e.g. 25 times as strong in a certain direction, it will remain 25 times as strong even after millions of lightyears. So at a distance where the weak signal would be barely detectable, you still have 25 times the threshold, which should be clearly detectable. Indeed, 25 times the strength means 5 times the reach, due to the inverse scale law.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You do realise that sending a message with an Apple product is tantamount to declaring war? Goddammit, did you not see that documentary with the MacBook?
No, it does not drop off "exponentially". That would be a much more extreme dropoff than inverse-square.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
I think you'd find that the translation of 4kb of info from a page in an alien encyclopaedia, would be a far bigger issue than either the bandwidth or the 200 year lag.
Except that Alpha Centauri's staggeringly advanced "alien" technology has solved this problem long, long ago.
Unfortunately, they have also developed staggeringly advanced spam filters that will dump our message in the "junk" folder.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Depends. I'm imagining just sending the chemical formulas across. It wouldn't be all that hard to come up with a lingua franca for chemistry - it's not like hydrogen behaves differently on Alpha Centauri or anything.
Pin down the chemistry basics, get the essential formulas, then send "oh yeah and also titanium plus these chemicals equals this other set of chemicals, add electricity and you get this, then separate and you get this". At that point it's just down to an engineering challenge to figure out that "separate" means "in a centrifuge at 2000 degrees", and in the meantime we'll be trying to pin down more words just in case our scientists can't get it across.
The goal isn't to transmit the exact right words, it's to transmit enough of the core breakthroughs that the science teams on either side can reconstruct whatever's left.
Of course we'll probably burn a few weeks trying to figure out why it isn't working before they think to mention that oh yeah their atmosphere is 22% sulfur, that might be important now that you mention it
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I wonder if we are going to get one back: "Can you keep the ^%£$&^$*$&^ noise down!"
"Based on human behavior" how? 1 in 10 of our responses to alien messages have been aggressive? 1 in 10 of humans would lead an interstellar invasion fleet according to polls? I'm curious.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
...right somebody has been reading too much pop-science and not nearly enough of the real thing.
You can't construct a species with *just* DNA, that idea was popular in the 60's real geneticists have long since learned better.
For starters, there are prions - which have a significant impact on how DNA is actually USED to make proteins, (same DNA, different prions - very different [and probably dead] result).
And that's not the half of it. Did you know that frog DNA is several orders of magnitude more complex than human DNA ?
Well it needs to be - frog eggs hatch in an uncontrolled environment so it's filled with little sequences that say things like "if temperature is between 0 and 5 C produces enzyme A, between 6 and 10C produce enzyme B" etc. (this is vastly oversimplified but you get the idea).
Human DNA is developed inside a perfectly controlled environment (known as the womb) so it doesn't bother with such code, all the code in there can assume that the development will be happening at around 37C.
Or how about the fact that you have about five billion times as many connections between the neurons in your brain (the rest of us about 15 :p ) as there are genes in the human genome ? In short, humans are a lot more complex than our DNA is.
Oh and how about this little gem. Inside the human genome is the complete DNA code for a very deadly virus. Split up into three disconnected sections (so it can't form the virus) - the virus itself is extinct but would have been quite the terrible plague in it's day - all mammals have it, we must have gotten it very shortly after we BECAME mammals, and it stuck because we stole a major trick from the virus. The virus knew how to hide itself from our immune systems - well, the DNA that encoded how it does that, is now used by fetuses to prevent the mother's immune system from killing them.
So... inside human DNA is DNA that isn't human, you *could* make a human being without having any of it (probably we don't know for sure that the other parts aren't used somewhere, but it's very unlikely) provided you had an alternate way of preventing the mother's immune system from attacking the fetus (or perhaps an artificial uterus).
In short, I'm with the GP: a DNA sequence, without any context will present (at best) a practical joke... come to think of it... if they managed to extract the virus bits and construct that (since, after all virusses are way simpler organisms and don't need all those prions and enzymes and mitochondria we do)... well, we may just end up unleashing a plague and wiping out the very aliens we were trying to contact (or at the very least, pissing them off and ensuring they arrange a visit from the galactic version of the CDC to come impose a permanent quarantine and pest-control)...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Considering that your transmission is going to take a hundred years to get there in the first place, 1 bit per second wouldn't be all that bad.
1 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 100 / 8 = a bit less than 400 megs enroute at any given time. So you could send them about half a cdrom before they even got the first bit, or about a wikipedia per decade. Of course if the deletionists get their way, we could probably send the wikipedia in about a month.
The Entire wikipedia is only about 5 gigs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database
Note that the bit rate is proportional to the transmit power and antenna size. I suspect if there were actually something out there, we'd have multiple GW class power plants feeding an orbital antenna the size of a small asteroid.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
But maybe mine. I plan on living to be at least 500, hopefully more. So far, so good.
Across the galaxy takes 200000 years round-trip so you better hope for quite a few more.
Slow data is better than no data...
Regular broadcast is already attenuated so much , that it is virtually indistinguishable from noise a few dozen AU from our planet...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Pluto is a planet, it's just one of 5 dwarf planets. So yes, to be completely accurate, they'd either need to ditch Pluto or add Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
All that said, I'm guessing 'ET' woouldn't give two shits about the dwarf planets. He'd see the gas giants, and maybe our 4 inner planets. If they looked really close, they might see some assorted rocky and icy belts, but nothing worth mentioning compared to the other planets.
Of course, part of the idea of dwarf planets is to make them open ended, so you don't need to memorize all of them. The analogy is to mountains: there are lots of mountains, people don't memorize them all, but they're still given special recognition.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Don't even joke about that. What are the odds that they're going to be able to see an object as small as Pluto?
"I'm counting four rocky inner planets, four gas giants, and... well, shit, there's no ninth planet. Moving on..."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Falling off geometrically doesn't sound anything like as exciting though.
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Our star is in the second generation, so anyone around a first generation star had a head start of a few billion years. They'd have much more difficulty reaching space because they'd have a shortage of heavier elements (most of the ones we have access to come from the collapse of first-generation stars). With self-replicating colonies and a decent ion drive (i.e. stuff we could build with known science and just a bit of engineering effort if we had the political will), it would take around a million years to colonise the entire galaxy. Between the formation of the first planets in this galaxy and the formation of life on Earth there was enough time for a few thousand species to be born, create galaxy-spanning empires, and die out (or become non-corporeal, or go to a different universe, or whatever species do once they've conquered the entire galaxy).
It's also worth noting that the majority of stars in this galaxy are binaries. Life around single stars might be more rare. The tidal forces from the two stars on the crust of a planet in a binary system are likely to increase surface radioactivity and mutation rate, and intelligence would be much more of an advantage in the rapidly changing environment of a planet in an eccentric orbit. It's entirely possible that there are interstellar civilisations around most of the binary stars in the galaxy, completely ignoring us because life around single stars is so unlikely it's not worth investing effort searching for.
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So how, in unambiguous binary, would you represent hydrogen? Pictorially it's easy. Well, kind of; you'll find that all of the visual models that we use, like a dot with a single circle around it, are actually tied very closely to human cognitive models. Unfortunately, you can't describe a picture encoding scheme until you've got basic communication. And even then you'd be assuming that they thought in terms of space in the same way that we do. If their primary sense is echolocation, for example, then they wouldn't think of distance and speed as separate quantities as we do and so a picture would be difficult for them to understand.
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You didn't include the 3000 years it would take to figure out the alien language over such a slow connection.
Definitely, sending the same message repeatedly is better than sending multiple messages in different encoding schemes. However:
The Arecibo message was designed to be as easy as possible to decode, it would be possible to do so with just a pencil and paper.
Designed, sure. I recall reading that it was nigh-impenetrable in practice, and it flip-flops between ways of encoding the same data at various points (e.g. it introduces a scheme for writing binary in limited space in the first part, then ditches it in favour of just extending the space in the second) which is hardly conducive to understanding. It should've been edited, then retransmitted. That way it would still stand out, but it would give some clues as to what it's actually meant to say.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
[1] Well, not quite, you also need to subtract the radius at the source of the beam.
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One bit per second is good enough for the Navy...
Yes, but only because they have prearranged short codes for orders that are likely to be given. A message only a handful of characters long can be useful under those circumstances.
A broadcasting alien civilization would only use a reflector if it knew where you were. I was speaking to the situation where said civilization is blindly broadcasting in all directions in the hope of the signal reaching someone else.
Ok, geometrically.
Or they might stop and say, "Oh, hey! We were about to build a hyperspace bypass through your solar system. But now that we know it's inhabited, we'll reroute that and give you an on-ramp. And by the way, here's the technology for zero-point energy, faster-than-light communication, and the meaning of life. Welcome to the club!"
Pointless Calculation...
What if they tried to send the exact same information to a neighbor, using Verizon wireless...
As a text message:
Base Pairs in DNA: 3,080,000,000
Total # Characters 6,160,000,000.00
Text Message Limit 160
# Text Messages: 38,500,000.00
Rate per Text Message: $0.20
Cost: $7,700,000.00
Using Verizon's 1.99/MB data rate:
Megabytes Data 770
Cost Per Megabyte $1.99
Total Cost $1,532.30
Mailing a Baggy full of sperm:
44 cents.
Seeing the look on your neighbor's face when she opens her envelope:
priceless
"Can you hear me now?"
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
"Ok, I understand the 'coolness' factor of radio transmissions to the stars, but in the end are they all wasted money?"
The only "wasted" money is his own. Let a man do something cool with his life without being criticized for adding billions to the federal deficit. As something of a romantic, I'd hope that he could make enough money selling that iPhone to a collector of mankind's First Contact artifacts to pay for the trip.
I'm not planning to die at all. Considering that there are more people living than have ever died, the odds aren't looking too bad ^.^
It is what it is.
Spoil sport!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It's really just a matter of trying to make things obvious. You send simple messages at first, allowing the receiver to guess at your format and confirm it with later messages. Then you start sending more complicated messages in the same format.
For example, use a character set of {00,01,10,11}, which I'm going to simplify as {0, 1, space, next} for display purposes. You receive:
0 0 0 0 ...
0 1 0 1
0 0 1 1
0 1 1 10
0 10 1 11
0 10 110 1000
1 0 0 0 ...
1 1 1 1
1 1 0 0
1 0 1 0
1 10 10 100
1 11 11 1001
Get it? Atoms would be done the same way. They even have an implicit order for sending!
It is a point source at any reasonable (astronomical) distance, that is to say it produces a spherical wave front not plane waves. It does fall off as 1/r^2. There are at least a couple of reasons to build big antennae, 1) to increase the area of the collection, and hence the energy collected, 2) to increase the aperture to minimize diffraction - of course the VLA has a much larger effective aperture.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction#Diffraction_by_a_circular_aperture
Though the approximation I like is lamba/Lens ~ distance/final area.
Alien #1: We're getting a weird signal from that yellow star.
Alien #2: I thought I told you not to bother with yellow stars and only listen to the orange ones - yellow stars won't have INTELLIGENT life.
Alien #1: But this signal it's definately not natural, look at it.
Alien #2: Smeg!, not astronomical phenomena known could make this signal it appears so, so random.
Alien #1: Let's try to decipher it.
Alien #2: Oh lets!
They try and try, but there is just no rhyme nor reason to the signal. Also it is never repeated, so it is assumed to be locally generated noise. It's called the 'Smegma Signal' and is a popular subject among those aliens who are known to wear tinfoil trousers to protect their brains from 'psychic waves'. The other aliens assume they probably sat down to hard when they were a larvae and tore a nerve bundle or three.
...
Me, I would take a consistent way of representing a hydrogen atom, helium atom, etc. Then describe some fundamental chemical reactions to illustrate what I'm getting at. Take that a step further, add additional vocabulary for describing electron shells, then describe some ionization reactions. Likewise for isotopes and radioactive decay.
Sooner or later, you have a language.
The way the structure of DNA is described in the original arecibo message is a great example IMO.
Of course, to describe any complex process you first you have to define a language for maths and logic.
And then you have mass, time, distance etc, which can all be described in terms of various atomic properties.
Of course, all this has been discussed at length a million times already.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
Considering that there are more people living than have ever died
That just seems a bit unlikely to me. Link please?
OTOH the entire section on Britney Spears ...
I can imagine more people interested about alien B.P. than titita.. titani... whatever.
But TV etc. is done to serve a (local) purpose. Beaming a signal into space is done merely to beam a signal into space. Your TV comparison is like saying, "Well, since I ate M&Ms at camp, the bears might already know about us. Therefore, I'll heat up this chocolate bar and blow the scent into the forest with a fan".
Anyhow, I've heard that radar is probably the most detectable signal we send out, not TV and radio.
Table-ized A.I.
*Looks around*
Yup. We're geeks alright.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Nah, they just accidentally farted with the mike on. They are otherwise ignoring us.
Table-ized A.I.
If it's like putting together Ikea furniture, I don't want to know where they mis-put the privates.
Table-ized A.I.
Just like my first discounted TRS-80 modem! Ah, the memories.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe they need to include Pluto so everyone who gets both messages will recognize it's the same spammer that keeps bothering them with infomercials.
forget quake, what about interstellar pr0nz
> The message encoded a DNA sequence
Great. Now they'll shove it into a machine and start cranking out babies to see what they're like.
Indeed, from their tech level, it'll prolly be trivial to "simulate" an actual planetfull of people, to see how they'd behave and treat one another and then they'd find out that we're all nasty sacks of...
Uhhh. Oh oh.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
an alien civilazation on Alpha Centauri would need an impractically large dish to intercept even a trickle of photons.
How did you calculate what is practical or impractical for an alien civilisation to build?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This particular item was more of an homage to Sagan and co. than an actual scientific experiment. That said, I do remember reading about Areceibo in a National Geographic article, which stated that Arecibo could pick up a message from a duplicate of itself transmitting anywhere in the Milky Way Galaxy, barring unfavorable local conditions within line of sight.
Man someone needs to power-wash that thing. I'm sure you get a better signal if it's clean.
Why is common sense called that if it's not common?
Considering that there are more people living than have ever died
That just seems a bit unlikely to me. Link please?
I don't think there is a credible source for this, as the ratio is probably about 1/20 - 1/10 (or less?)... I do wonder at which point of the history the ratio was greatest?
(Discounting the arbitrary beginning where humanoids could for the first time be defined as humans)
It is what it is.
Alien race re-creates humans based on DNA sequence received from Arecibo. Hilarity ensues....
Our star is in the second generation, so anyone around a first generation star had a head start of a few billion years.
But you're forgetting that those first generation stars would not have abundant "interesting" elements form which to both form life and conduct interesting experiments with. These elements are birthed during the late cycles of a star's life and hence would not have been available to a first gen star system.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
So? Who cares? Is it relevant to the story - I mean, do they tell us what the model of all the computers they use? What about the companies involved in the construction of the radio telescope?
The sad thing is, this probably wouldn't have made Slashdot if another phone had been used.
I agree with the other poster too - if he had have used another phone, it wouldn't have been mentioned. Because most people just get on and use products - they don't stop and say "Hey isn't this cool, I can do this on my Iphone", giving a free advert to Apple, even though everyone else can do the same thing.
- I'm posting this using a Windows PC with Intel Core Duo processor *ding dong ding dong* -
It is nice he provided a good bit of PR on the web for Arecibo. The bit about using an iPod is essential to his artistic statement I suppose, "coolest iPod in the world" is maybe something that could have gotten Apple to fund Arecibo if he had been at all interested in it. That would have gotten the director on his side too.
May I suggest the one thing we should NOT send is our DNA sequences.
1) Low security. If they were able to do anything with it I would be pretty worried! Sending them the key to our metabolism is a Bad Idea.
2) Impossible to fully decode without knowledge of Earth biology.
3) A very inefficient signal. A better message could have been devised, with much more fun and stimulation, by a competent university department.
4) I have a problem with a guy who says this sort of thing to Arecibo's interim director. It is typical wannabe bullshit. I've worked with artists but none would have the balls to go to a scientific research center and tell them that SETI is not about finding aliens. As if he had never read Contact.
One bit per second is good enough for the Navy...
Yes, but only because they have prearranged short codes for orders that are likely to be given. A message only a handful of characters long can be useful under those circumstances.
We're talking about 200 years of latency here... I think we can tolerate the message taking a few weeks to transmit...
Just to add to the geek levels in this thread, 1 bit/s = 86.4kb/day, which means we would transmit the 3,153,600,000th bit as the first bit reached its destination, or 394 MB. That's about one well-compressed episode of your favorite science fiction show... Should we start with SG-1 or BSG?
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Because Orcus hasn't been recognized by the IAU yet. Sedna and Vesta, as well.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Greg Bear's Forge of God and Anvil of Stars books cover this too. Basically, civilisations that don't learn to shield emissions early on in their development attract von Neumann machines that pre-emptively attack noisy civilisations before they become interstellar. There's a galactic organisation that tries to rescue targeted civilisations, and punish the makers of the probes.
FoG covers the Earth getting destroyed (no spoiler necessary, the cover depicts Earth going boom) and Anvil follows Earth's children as they are guided on a mission of revenge - great books, IMHO.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
"...but directional signals degrade less slowly"
[pedant] Hang on, doesn't less slowly = faster? [/pedant}
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.