Physicists Call For Alien Messaging Protocol

schliz writes "Researchers have called for the development of a messaging framework that could increase the probability that our interplanetary messages are detected and deciphered – assuming Orson Scott Card's vision of telepathic buggers doesn't come true. The trio of postgraduate astrophysicists suggest a Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence protocol (METI — PDF) for signal encoding, message length, information content, transmission method and periodicity. The protocol could be tested via a website that allows users to create, retrieve and decrypt sample messages that conform to the protocol — which also demonstrates communication across human cultural boundaries, they say."

Comments

Anonymouse Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell is any of that going to make it easier for aliens to understand? Anonymouse

Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves now. Before we do this alien thing, why not try to see if we can solve this problem here on Earth first? (I watched way too much MythBusters).

For example, I am Chinese. And pretend I don't know a single English word and the alphabet, write something and make me understand. Anything at all. It can be a hello of some sort even. Not easy isn't it. How about trying it on some isolated tribes? Remember, no interaction, no eye contact, nothing. Pure pencil on paper.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[dintech]

telepathic buggers

Let's not get ahead of ourselves now

Don't get behind me either!

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[ILoveCrack83]

Exactly. A frame of reference needs to be established first. This is hard even on earth. How the hell are they supposed to establish this between planets?!?!

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

*ninjas behind you ^_^*

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[totally bogus dude]

Wasn't that precisely the idea that "The protocol could be tested via a website that allows users to create, retrieve and decrypt sample messages that conform to the protocol - which also demonstrates communication across human cultural boundaries" was addressing?

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[AmiMoJo]

Cats had this figured out years ago. Despite not speaking a word of any human language they have no trouble communicating their demands to their staff^W owners.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Richard_at_work]

The recipients in that case have an advantage - they know that theres a protocol being followed, and they may even know the inner details of that protocol. In the challenge posted above, you wouldn't even know theres a protocol, let alone anything about it. All the testing website does is certify that a given message conforms to the protocol.

In the above challenge, the equivilent is handing the entire encoded message to someone with no prior knowledge of the protocol, and having them successfully decode and understand it. They may be able to infer that there is a protocol being used by the fact that there is a structure to the information, but that may not be immediately obvious nor easily detected - think of the excitement that quasars created in astronomy until someone discovered they were just stars giving out radio pulses that just happened to be regular and artificial looking.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Stooshie]

It's not about them understanding English or whatever language we package up. It's about any alien looking at the data and realising that there is actually information here, rather than just random streams of data (not necessarily about understanding the content). Once they realise there is information then they can get to work on trying to decipher it. The protocol is a kind of flag waving saying something like "interesting stuff over here guys".

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, no interaction, no eye contact, nothing. Pure pencil on paper.

We already have this, it's a big part of archeology.

But pencil on paper is too easy for this problem.
The two groups should only be able to communicate using numbers.
We'll likely have nothing more sophisticated than Morse code.

Each packet would have to assume packet loss, and therefore contain the entire heading for: "here's our numbering system, here's our alphabet, here's the language, here's the protocol definition, here's the encoding (etc etc etc)".
Especially considering most of these "conversations" will be uni-directional, assuming we have any at all.

Though, you'd think we likely have better things to be working on than establishing a high-level protocol for communicating with someone we haven't found yet...
At least until we get some kind of indication that there's someone worth talking to (or capable of communicating).
I guess I find it hard to believe that the first thing an alien civilization would want to do after establishing contact would be to update their Facebook status.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[CoccoBill]

This is easy, obviously the language should be english spoken really slowly and loudly, everyone understands that, right?

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[clarkkent09]

1, 2, 3, 4 ... then 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4 ... pretty soon you'd get the pattern and figure out those are numbers. can i draw pictures? if so, it's easy. if not then i would use math to describe something you know about, like days, years, atomic numbers etc and assign them names. by then we would have some start of a vocabulary and build from there. it would be difficult at first but once you have a few simple words it would get easier

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[chichilalescu]

just a rough idea:

first order logic is a universal language, and any society with a reasonable level of technology could understand it. we would need to think of a generic way to define an alphabet, and then just use it to construct a few basic notions (like real numbers). afterwards, reasonably complicated messages could be sent with this extended language (such as position in galaxy, how to build a better communication protocol, etc).

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Keen Anthony]

Shut up, you. Mr. Wizard blew away everything Discovery channel has put out. Otherwise, yes, you're correct about MythBusters.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[MichaelSmith]

I recall reading about a SETI experiment where one team devised a message and a second team tried to interpret the message. They failed, even though it wasn't a good test because both teams had a common history. I don't expect us to succeed with aliens. We can't talk to elephants, dolphins, orangutans, etc.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Stooshie]

Unfortunately, an alphabet is purely our method of representing the audible sounds that come out of our mouth. Even using numbers is arbitary. The only common thing would be to represent numbers as a series of dots (e.g. 1 dot for 1, 2 dots for 2 etc...) and then display the first, say, 100 prime numbers. That would certainly get any technologically advanced race interested. We would need to then go on to try and use these numbers to convey a message like here's how to get in touch.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[nospam007]

"For example, I am Chinese. And pretend I don't know a single English word and the alphabet, write something and make me understand."

II III IIIII IIIIIII IIIIIIIIIII

Here's a 50 year old method too.

http://www.weirdwarp.com/2010/07/how-to-talk-to-aliens/

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[chichilalescu]

in the sense of mathematical logic, an alphabet is an arbitrary collection of symbols. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic .

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

Exactly my hidden challenge my bro :)

Talking to animals could be easier than talking to ET. At least we live in the same place and eat generally the same stuff.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

My species is blind you insensitive clod. :)

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

and if 25 ETs likes your page you get custom URL! :D

Anyway, I'll start believing when some dude has a method to talk to dolphins, then scale it down to the lowest vertebrate, before trying anything on Mars.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[dkleinsc]

What do you mean? Of course Cats can speak human language:
All your base are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction. You have no chance to survive make your time.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

wait... are you from my ESL class?! t-o-m-a-t-o!!

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Rockoon]

No, alphabets are not purely methods of representing audible sounds.

Computers encode information with a 2 symbol alphabet, for example, and further use that alphabet to encode a larger 256 symbol alphabet.. and so on.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Stooshie]

That's fine but you would still need a way to represent first order logic without resorting to symbols. The lowest common denominator would have to be dots or marks representing numbers where the number of dots or marks is equivalent to the number of things represented. E.G. "oo ooo ooooo ooooooo ooooooooooo" etc ... (The editor wouldn't allow me to use so many full stops).

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Captain Hook]

Days and years, by which I assume you mean the number of hours in a day, and the number of days in a year, wouldn't be a good place to start building a language because it's specific to our planet.

Hours are an arbitary unit of time, based on geometry and astronomy, therefore 24 would mean nothing to an alien species without them already knowing some specific information about our planet such as how long a day is (in their time reference system) and that we have divided a circle into 360 parts etc. Similarly, the number of days in a year, they would already need to know a fair bit about our planet to realise what 365 means.

Sending the number of days might be useful a bit later on for identifying our planet within the solar system, assuming aliens with similar technology to us, i.e. able to recieve an intentionally sent message from a star, and detect in certain circumstances whether a star has a planet and the basic orbital mechnics of those planets (see Note 1). If they can detect our planet, know it's orbital period and it's rate of spin, then 365 would be clearly point to our planet since it's the only one in our solar system with that number of days in the year.

Note 1: With our current technology, we couldn't detect Earth sized planets around our nearest stars, it's too small, but it's hoped the next generation stuff could detect an Extrasolar Earth

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Snaller]

"For example, I am Chinese. And pretend I don't know a single English word and the alphabet, write something and make me understand. Anything at all. It can be a hello of some sort even. Not easy isn't it. How about trying it on some isolated tribes? Remember, no interaction, no eye contact, nothing. Pure pencil on paper."

Or try teaching Republicans that Global warming is a real. That's impossible even with eye contact and visual aids.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[EdgeyEdgey]

Try this
Esperanto
ghi estas tre facila al kompreni

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[GameboyRMH]

So we have a few messages to choose from. The most desperate plea for attention is the "I want breakfast, why did you take so goddamn long to get here" sound (MEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOWWWW), but we don't want the aliens to think we want to eat them.

There's also the less irritating "I want cuddles" sound (mrow. mrow. mrow.) But then the aliens might misunderstand this and think we want to have freaky human genital sex with their tentacle-based genitalia.

I think the only safe option is the "open the door" sound (Mr-ow? Mr-ow? Mr-ow?) It can only be interpreted as a call for communication.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[multipartmixed]

That's true -- however, I think it can be reasonably assumed that anybody trying to decode these messages at least has a basic grasp of physics and is smart enough to build a radio.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[GameboyRMH]

How can you even get the attention of something like a chimp or a dolphin? Something highly intelligent, yet not intelligent enough to try to decipher the meaning of a drawing rather than flinging poo or frolicking in the waves.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, give them 3 data streams. 2 of them are normal recordings of what we receive from space, while the third is such a recording with the message mixed in (as it would be received, i.e. low intensity, and probably partially unrecognisable due to other signals). The first task would be to find out which of these recordings contain the message (and even then there would be a distinct advantage, in that he would at least know that there's a message hidden in it, and moreover, that the message was created by someone who thinks like a human). The second task would then be to decode the message (or the part which still is recognisable).

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

I agree my examples are too extreme.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[bronney]

Yeah I think starting with the elements would be best bet. After all, the universe is full of these stuff and it's something we have in common with everything else. Other things like languages, calendar, or even logic is purely human construct. Hell not every one of us is logical here on Earth.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[maxwell demon]

That assumes that the aliens have a visual system, and that this visual system is similar enough to ours that bitmaps make sense to them. Yes, they most probably would be able to decode a bitmap after understanding how it works. But we cannot expect them to have an intuitive understanding of the concept of bitmaps. And especially we cannot expect them to get the idea that some data we've sent them contains a bitmap if they never thought even about the possibility of bitmaps.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[rjmx]

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100010 01101100 01100101 01101101 00100000 01101001 01110011 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110110 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101100 01100001 01101110 01100111 01110101 01100001 01100111 01100101 00111011 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101100 01100001 01101110 01100111 01110101 01100001 01100111 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01101101 01101111 01101110 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00101100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 01100001 01101110 01110100 01101100 01111001 00101100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110111 01100001 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100011 01100101 01101001 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101100 01101001 01111010 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100001 01100111 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 01100100 00101110

Yep. Dead right.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Coren22]

I don't know. Cats will be really friendly when they want something, but they will also be randomly really friendly. Sometimes they will try to lead you somewhere when they want something, but sometimes my cat runs ahead of me when I am heading into the bathroom, and then hops right into the tub, does this mean she wants a shower?

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Electricity Likes Me]

Bottom-up engineering is really the principle we need to apply though. If cross-boundaries communication works on Earth, that's data we can collect and study to find out what the points of contention are - i.e. we can look at what elements are most commonly misinterpreted across cultures.

With that in mind, you can then move on to tests like you specify - corrupted datastreams, noisy datastreams etc. But to get anywhere, at the very least we need to figure out how we can - scientifically - traverse the cultural boundaries of Earth. But it does stand to reason that we can make at least some assumptions - after all - we're not trying to talk to creationists from Texas, we can make a very fair assumption that whoever receives messages from Earth is probably somewhere near or familiar with the forefronts of their society's technological and scientific achievements and would notice particular aspects we can assume, at our present understanding, are common to the universe (oddities like a potential shift in alpha along an axis not withstanding).

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[a_hanso]

For starters: Use binary; Encode a series of prime numbers in the header; Followed by a block of atomic numbers; Precede block with a tag that can later be used to identify a number as referring to an element; transmit basic shapes using Cartesian coordinates; use 21cm (hydrogen line wavelength) as the length measure; delimit blocks using radio silence;

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[maxwell demon]

Translation to view shapes is easy for you because you view.

For a non-viewing species a view shape would probably be just as obvious as for us is the four-dimensional concept of a flat torus dividing a 3-sphere in two halves. That is, you can manage to get some understanding, but it is not obvious at all.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[thomasdz]

1, 2, 3, 4 ... then 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4 ... pretty soon you'd get the pattern and figure out those are numbers.

No, 1+1=10, 1+10=11, 1+11=100
what kind of strange world do you live in.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Jack9]

> They failed, even though it wasn't a good test because both teams had a common history.

Sounds like the test was an abject failure when both sides were at the same technology level and had a common history and were the same specistill couldn't communicate effectively.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[DerekLyons]

1, 2, 3, 4 ... then 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4 ... pretty soon you'd get the pattern and figure out those are numbers

That's easy when you can use visual representation. It's not nearly so easy when using a stream of binary data.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[AmiMoJo]

It makes more sense if you try to remember that in the cat's mind YOU are the pet ;-)

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[h4rm0ny]

Ninjas are Japanese, dude. Not Chinese. You're going to have to settle for being a Shaolin Monk. Less cool toys, but you do get to be enlightened and stuff.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[AmiMoJo]

I find it amusing that people talk to their cats as if the cat understands some of what is being said, and cats speak to humans as if the human understands some of what is being said.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Coren22]

Good point.

Also, when I get home I always get the impression that she is saying to me "And where have you been?"

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[pohl]

That's why you need multiple layers in your transmission. The obvious signal should be a long, slow count of all of the prime numbers up to some arbitrary cut-off, like 9973. Then the transmission should repeat. This will give the aliens a strong clue that you're operating in base-10. Then, layered in your transmission - perhaps in a side channel, or by having different signals in amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and polarization modulation, you can give multilayered information.

The next-most-obvious signal in your "palimpsest" should be a primer of some sort. This is where you can build basic mathematic, chemistry, etc. — ultimately building up to the detailed instructions for building a device the aliens can build that will transport one of them through a wormhole to talk to her dead father.

That should do it.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Culture20]

Let's not get ahead of ourselves now. Before we do this alien thing, why not try to see if we can solve this problem here on Earth first? (I watched way too much MythBusters). For example, I am Chinese. And pretend I don't know a single English word and the alphabet, write something and make me understand. Anything at all. It can be a hello of some sort even. Not easy isn't it. How about trying it on some isolated tribes? Remember, no interaction, no eye contact, nothing. Pure pencil on paper.

Easy. We have lots of common frames of reference. For example, the desire to greet, communicate, and say goodbye at the end of a conversation (you didn't say you were an autistic chinese person, but they would be a better example of an alien). I assume you're not excluding pictures? That would make it easy to communicate with almost any non-blind person.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Culture20]

yew
her
w
yay
h
yaw
r
yah

and all that is assuming something yah is 1+3 what if "1+"is represented as a Y with an empty space where the second addend is placed, thus an entirely different character, and there is no separate "+" character?

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Culture20]

My species is blind you insensitive clod. :)

Then your species has built its radio receivers to produce sounds or smells or tastes or tactile warming or *sauce* to *taste*. We're not going to send stuff out in any medium other than radio waves, so we're going to rely on the aliens to change our radio pulses into something they can experience. Hopefully they don't directly experience radio waves, else we might have a big problem down the line: http://www.amazon.com/Blonde-Bombshell-Tom-Holt/dp/0316086991

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Culture20]

Isolated tribes aren't traveling hundreds of lightyears minimum in a space machine, it's safe to assume that someone aboard there spacecraft understand advanced math and math based communication (such as signaling prime numbers).

Maybe signaling prime numbers isn't obvious to them as a sign of sentience because everything on their planet uses primes in some manner? Perhaps they think OOgleBOOgleGrAH is the perfect sign of sentience. Or maybe sentience is relatively unimportant to them, and they're looking for "5". If a sentient species intelligently asks back "5 what?", the first species knows they aren't "5" and ignores or kills them (not for religion, sport, disgust, efficiency, food, or anything we'd understand. they do it for "89").

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[mick129]

1, 2, 3, 4 ... then 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4 ... pretty soon you'd get the pattern and figure out those are numbers

I can see 1, 2, 3, 4 working... but how do you denote the + and = symbols? ASCII?

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[cthulhu11]

So what you're saying is that EBCDIC is right out.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[Phoghat]

Finally, someone who actually understands what TFA is all about. We don't need to communicate meaning, what we need to communicate is that there is meaning contained in the message. Things like broadcasting lists of prime numbers for example would show an alien civilization out there that here exists a civilization that has the brainpower to understand primes.

In many SF stories about first contact it is given to a linguist to achieve communication, but first a common ground has to be established so that the alien entity will notice that we too are intelligent beings taht can communicate.

Re:Try this on Earth first, noobie.

[tabrnaker]

How do you get the attention of anything? Show them what they need or something novel. Haven't you read ANY animal research?

Surprising

[symes]

As TFA reports:

"An advanced civilization within a radius of 100 light years could detect our television shows and already know we are here, so there is little hope in concealing our location in space," they wrote.

So if first impressions matter, developing some standard protocol is kind of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. Impressions will have been informed on our early TV output. There could well be whole institutions on other worlds tasked with decoding the antics of Tom and Jerry. No wonder they've stayed away.

Re:Surprising

[yahwotqa]

Great, so if we encounter alien life (or it encounters us), we can finally have following conversation for real:

President:I know there is much to learn from each other if we can make a truce. We can find a way to Co-exist. can there be a peace between us?
Alien: Peace? NO PEACE!
President: What is it you want us to do?
Alien: Die... Die.

Re:Surprising

[Grygus]

I would be somewhat surprised if we were ever to meet aliens more aggressive than we are. It seems to me that Humans are on the very edge of successful aggression; any more aggressive and we'd probably all be dead.

Re:Surprising

[WillKemp]

How do you know they've stayed away? We probably haven't had radio for long enough for them to get here yet. They could be on their way right now - and very hungry after 50 years on the road!

Re:Surprising

[WillKemp]

They may not be more aggressive, but if they can get here they're definitely smarter. So if they're as aggressive as us, we're dead!

Re:Surprising

[h00manist]

Detecting that there is a trasmission that is TV is one thing, but there's no telling that they would actually be able to decode the television signals and see or hear the content. Don't know that it will be that easy to reverse-engineer a tv transmission without having or even knowing what a TV is.

Re:Surprising

[inasity_rules]

A interesting point. Another one is, if they can detect our signals, why can't we detect theirs? In developing technology, they would most likely use wireless, and unless there are planets much older or younger then us within range, I reckon it is reasonable to assume they would be fairly close in tech development to us.

In other words I consider it unlikely that they are there, given we haven't heard/detected them yet. A signal will spread an attenuate quite a lot over 100 light years, so I'm not even sure we would be detectable. I think 100 light years is extremely optimistic...

Thus concludes my set of opinions that have no citations other then my own meandering anecdotal experience...

Re:Surprising

[Sibko]

Sadly, [or not, depending on your outlook] aliens within a hundred lightyears probably won't be able to detect us by our radio signals.

Journalists, knowing very little of science, make the mistake of assuming that the only part of the equation that matters here is the speed the signal travels at, and how long it's been traveling for. Ergo you get "ZOMG we sent out radio signals a hundred years ago, that means anything within a hundred lightyears can see us!"

What they don't seem to consider is the strength of the signal. Thanks to the inverse square law, any signal we blast into the cosmos is going to get fainter and fainter the further it travels. Eventually you get to a distance where the signal is imperceptible above the noise of the universe itself. Now, said aliens could still have some pretty impressive detecting gear - radiotelescopes the size of planets? Who know! But chances are they don't, and we've gone completely unnoticed.

Re:Surprising

[Captain Hook]

It's been 60 years since the first powerful television transmissions, since then wireless communication has become far more widespread but is being reduced in transmission power and used in a more directional manner because by using a lot of short range transmitters rather than a few long range transmitters you get to reuse the frequency in another area without interference with Fibre Optic connection provide the vast majority of the bandwidth and would be completely hidden.

Any Alien civilisation will have the same problem with regard to limited wireless bandwidth and is likely to take a similar approach to delivering information.

Based on a sample of 1 (Earth), it would seem that looking at planets RF emmissions, you would see nothing until a civilisation first developes RF technology, A huge burst of RF noise, then the noise slowly dieing away over however long it takes that civilisation to develop better technologyuntil it's too weak to detect, and for us to detect this very short period of time in an alien civilisation, they would have had to develop this technology within the last 50 years that we have had the capability to hear them + the transmission time from their planet.

Re:Surprising

[GameboyRMH]

Wow, maybe more thought went into Independence Day than it seems?

Re:Surprising

[GameboyRMH]

They can be more aggressive collectively - see the Irkens in Invader Zim. Individually they weren't any more aggressive than humans, but their society is a highly aggressive expansionist empire.

Re:Surprising

[GameboyRMH]

Forget that! What about the reality TV, the BS product/scam advertisements, the psychic / ghost hunter shows, and the shitty anime? WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO THINK OF US AFTER SEEING 07GHOST OR CARD CAPTOR SAKURA?

Re:Surprising

[maxwell demon]

You cannot use quantum teleportation to send information FTL (nor in any sense instantaneously) unless you already have a way to send information FTL. You always need a classical signal from the sender to the receiver. Without that classical signal, all you get at the other end is noise. So unless you manage to send that classical signal FTL, you cannot communicate FTL using quantum teleportation.

Re:Surprising

[eyrieowl]

or, maybe were simply at the sweet spot for aggression. less aggression would have resulted in fewer wars, less churning of the gene pool, perhaps less pressure to innovate. more aggression would have prevented formation of societies and kept us few and far between.

Re:Surprising

[Coren22]

Like the aliens in District 9?

Re:Surprising

[k6mfw]

Consider it the other way around, we don't care if space aliens broadcasted dumbass TV shows. Simply having credible evidence there is life outside our solar system would be exciting news! Now if they were to decode such TV shows, think of the possibilities. For one, who would own the copyright if any?

Re:Surprising

[r0b!n]

Jerry Springer

There is just one difficulty

[Kupfernigk]

To develop this as a proper standard, the "aliens" also need to be on the standards committee. So first of all we need a pre-protocol to identify aliens suitably qualified to participate in the standards process.

Also, should this start off as an IEEE exercise, or should it go straight to ISO? If the latter, we'll have to rename it the "Interplanetary Standards Organisation". And then we might find that one already exists and it will be us asking if we can send delegates.

Truly this is a can of worms.

Re:There is just one difficulty

[shish]

I wouldn't bother with ISO; microsoft would just buy all the voters so that they can have an obfuscated binary blob as the standard "hello world" packet

Re:There is just one difficulty

[Sentrion]

We came really close once but the aliens wouldn't cough up the change to view the standards. Hey, standards cost money to develop and you can't just go around sharing information for free! I say $1,000.00 to view the PDF file should be reasonable.

Is he wanting false positives (for funding)?

[nzac]

I would think that you could turn a lot of background noise into something that looks like a message.

Assuming that they need not have an alphabet based language and could use communication with zero redundancy i would expect you could get something that could look like data modulated with with amplitude, frequency and phase over a short period. Of course they are likely to have some kind of error detection/correction but that could be found at another frequency.

Re:Is he wanting false positives (for funding)?

[mangu]

I would think that you could turn a lot of background noise into something that looks like a message.

If you look hard enough, anything at all looks like a message

I sense a patent possiblillty here

[Adayse]

More reliable method for the delivery of prayer to god:
1. take prayer
1.1. censor unworthy content
2. sign with personal key of the faithful
3. add content length and encoding header
4. beam into space at regular intervals in all ways you can think of

Re:I sense a patent possiblillty here

[Stooshie]

5. Sell personal keys to the faithful.
6. Profit!

Mostly irrelevant

[Kjella]

The point is getting communication established, that they know we're there and we know they're there. For this say a simple prime sequence should be enough (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 beeps). Clearly not natural, invariant of the base system used (primes are primes in binary, octal, hex, whatever) - any civilization with math should recognize it.

Between two prime sequences I'd go with simple binary pictograms first sending width length then pixels. As you get a bunch of them it'll be easy to see the pattern that you get 11111110111110[35 bits] = (7)(5)(35 bits of data), (10)(8)(80 bits of data) before we start the prime series again.

What you put in the pictogram is of lesser value, you could have thousands of them on a cycle years long with things like math, alphabet, physics, chemistry, solar system, drawings of humans, take your pick. If first a civilization picks it up they can grab all of them until they get a full loop.

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[ledow]

Pictograms are all but worthless. There are a billion interpretations and mostly that's assuming a 2D system of "vision" / "interpretation". And basically boils down to trying to teach someone who doesn't know anything about your species how to write and interpret images (like trying to teach a wild dolphin to read Shakespeare or recognise pictures of fruit with ZERO feedback about their correctness - intelligent or not, writing is still new to *us* because we've only been doing it for a tiny percentage of the time that humans have existed).

And your encoding is ambiguous - how do they know it's not length, then width? Or that it's not length then width then depth followed by a 3D representation (possibly the length might tell you that but once you get into that level of interpretation, you can "make sense" of any nonsense whatsoever)? Or that you didn't put the length/width at the end, or in the middle, or in whatever offset *they* consider logical? Yes, there may be a "pattern" of X times Y that gives us the size of the "packet" but there are probably a million other way of interpreting raw bits that would work out in the same way (i.e. if the first bit is a one, then the message is junk, so ignore it, parity, etc.)

You're just making far too many assumptions about mathematics and interpretation. This is the problem, almost everything we try will probably be useless because we've never encountered an intelligence other than our own, so we have *no* idea how to communicate at all. Who says they are even LOOKING at EM radiation? Maybe in a thousand years we won't even bother looking at it either (because of things like light-year limits to it's readability, degradation, interference, etc.) - maybe the sign of an "intelligent" civilisation will be using (insert whatever fancy physics you like here) systems instead and not bother with "pre-quantum" civilisations, etc.

And a thousand years in time, galactically, is nothing. And any civilisation that lasts long enough to contact others is much more likely to be millions of years more advanced than we are by sheer probability. MILLLIONS. As in CERN, the satellite systems, mainframes and the whole of civilisation would look like a fragment of fossil in the rock to them, technologically.

Prime numbers? The numbers that occur in nature when you take out all factors (in your case, just those up to 5) and occur often in purely physical systems? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#Prime_numbers_in_nature) There are species of animal that come out every prime year in order to avoid predators that work on various regular intervals and being prime reduces their chances. It's not hard to imagine that such things could get lost in the noise (i.e. you can probably "see" prime numbers everywhere if you bother to look) or simply are a by-product of ordinary physics (e.g. primes pop up in the Zeta-function etc.)

I agree the primes are simple but they won't necessarily attract attention. It's also assuming that maths is as universal as we hope (I'm a mathematician, but it's not hard to imagine somewhere where mathematics doesn't exist in a form we would understand). Carl Sagan suggests them as a way to demonstrate that an alien understand mathematics in a novel, but it's a bit far-fetched to say the least (messages from God are also hidden in pi in the book).

The problem is that it's incredibly easy to send anything we want but we have absolutely ZERO idea about how it would ever be interpreted. Even if we found a remote hidden tribe in the Amazon that had never had human contact and were mathematically literate and we gave them the messages and after 50 years they were able to decode them, it wouldn't mean *anything* because their brains would work the same way as ours, with the same perceptions and senses. Also, it would still take thousands of years for any reply (or else we'd *probably* have been visited already).

Finding ET is viable - it's easy to craft a "we're over here" signal just by sheer brute force and pushin

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[buravirgil]

This is Eleanor Arroway, transmitting on 14.2 megahertz.

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[chichilalescu]

math is universal. the fact that we can see the same emission and absorbtion spectra in faraway galaxies as on Earth means that quantum phyics is a pretty good theory throughout the universe; in turn this means the math used for quantum physics has been found by all civilisations with a technology similar to our own (even if their formulation is different, the information content is implicitely the same).
The axioms are there to define the language, not to define reality; there are plenty of people who work with variations of the basic set of axioms, and that's still mathematics.
If you are referring to "is the axiom of choice real in our universe?", it doesn't really make sense to ask that question yet. All of the physics we have so far assumes the axiom of choice, and it describes the observed phenomena quite well. I can't imagine what level of technology we would have to reach in order to ask this question and be able to design an experiment to answer it.

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[Eivind]

It's ambigious, sure. But you can help. A sequence that consists of a product-of-two-primes-symbols, can only be split one way.

If 35 bits (for example) are to be split up at all, then 5*7 (or 7*5) is the only way to do it. And you can give hints to that interpretation by framing, it doesn't take a genious to figure out how to split:

11111110000000[data-in-groups-of7-here]00000001111111

the 7-groups of 1s and 0s, connected with the fact that the *entire* string is cleanly splittable in chunks-of-7 is a fairly strong hint that this is the thing to do.

Getting people to arrange the groups in a 2-dimensional grid is more difficult, but mutiplication-as-area is fairly inituitive, the area of a 5x7 rectangle is 35. 5 groups of 7 objects, can be arranged in two dimensions cleanly. (but NOT in 3, because 5 and 7 are primes)

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[multipartmixed]

Your reply seems to be of the "communicating with ET is hard, so let's not try" variety. I think that's a cop-out.

You say, "they might not be looking at EM" - I say, "Why not?" - and more appropriately, "What other choices do WE have?" -- EM is the only way we have of getting a signal off our planet.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that alien scientists receiving our signal will be smart enough to build radios, and this probably means a basic understanding of mathematics. Almost certainly we will not be *accidentally* picked up -- it will be some alien SETI program.

You also seem to think that we have to be able to communicate with every kind of alien. I submit that it is enough to craft messages which can be received by aliens which are at least somewhat like us. After all, the universe is vast...

Once we have gotten their attention -- prime numbers WILL probably suffice -- we can certainly begin encoding simple messages. The start of the encoding stream could be things like circles and triangles, which are probably obvious enough that they would know that they got the decoder right.

Then we can move on to bigger universal things, like chemistry. Then maybe on to explaining mathematics, and tying the math into chemistry. Once we have math and chemistry, we can develop measurement units. Then we can send them diagrams of ourselves.

Or maybe a picture of the Milky Way, and arrow saying "come find us here!"

Or maybe a map of our night sky -- a sufficiently advanced race could use this to find our location.

The possibilities are boundless. Throwing them out because the probability of universal success is low. The probability of success in at least one locale is much higher - at least if you assume an infinite universe.

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

That's 34 bits split by 2 and 17 with one parity bit at the end. Or 33 bits split by 3 and 11 with leading and trailing marker bits. Or 5 groups of seven each of which has 5 data bits and two marker bits.

What seems simple to interpret to those with hindsight is not as simple to those who thing differently.

Re:Mostly irrelevant

[ledow]

- Assuming ET life exists
- Assuming it's inside our sphere of expanding radio emissions
- Assuming they are within similar stages of scientific discovery
- Assuming they are seriously looking for us (and haven't yet found us) and / or that they spot us by complete accident
- Assuming they realise what it is and don't take several YEARS to decide what to actually do about that (as our governments almost certainly would).
- Assuming that they then initiate contact in a way we can understand which arrives here within a human lifetime.
- Assuming that we then receive, understand and need to form an initial reply to broadcast to them, and don't take YEARS to decide what to do about it.
- Assuming that they then receive our reply, understand it, and wish to communicate with us
- Assuming that we then wish to exchange, as a planet, information about ourselves with an unknown foreign entity
- Assuming that all of the above happens within our lifetime, or the next generation or so

Then it would *still* be an enormous waste of research funds to discuss *NOW* what language to talk in. It's like those kids who argue over whether to write the next Facebook / World of Warcraft in VB or Java - they'll still be arguing long before the entire memory of such things is dead.

Most astrophysicists believe it to be an incredibly bad idea to advertise even our presence, let alone communicate - you can be sure that they will express those sentiments when brought into discussions by the government.

Yes, it would be fascinating to discover a friendly civilisation, at approximately the same scientific level as ourselves who we communicate with and pass useful information. It can't happen for DECADES, which means we have plenty of time in which to sort things out, such as language. Almost certainly anything we "design" now will be useless (e.g. say we find out that in just 50 years time sending quantum-entangled particles provides much more sensible communication because of speed / space / penetration etc. issues - and that won't work on a "binary" basis, then all that research is useless).

The possibilities are boundless. Which means that the budget is too. Unless and until we have anything even close to a simple contact (e.g. a "WOW" signal that's repeatable) and need to send a single message and hope for reply within the next few millenia, it's pointless to discuss it seriously. It's literally like figuring out which question you will ask God when you find him, or what stick you'll poke into the edge of the universe to see what happens.

The probability of success is entirely, completely miniscule. We haven't found a single *candidate* for a planet supporting developed life, let alone received anything approaching a confirmation that there *could* be life anywhere. So suggesting that we "pick and choose" only those that reply to our existing messages is silly already - that is automatic and any reply must be a reply that we can perceive and that they understood in the first place.

Alien scientists may not even have a need to perceive our signal at all, thus receiving it may be impossible. We will almost certainly be using different technologies (given that today we ourselves are using different technologies to just 50 years ago).

If they are more developed, our radio attempts might literally be like us seriously shining a torch in the sky and looking for a big flashing visible-white reply. Things on a subatomic scale that we're *not* measuring are much more likely to get somewhere useful in a decent amount of time, facilitate near-real-time two-way communication and not be hindered by everything else in the universe (e.g. neutrinos).

Getting their attention is the thing that matters but, to be honest, we can't be sure that anything we send is actually getting anywhere. There are several theories that nothing electromagnetic outside 2 light years would be at a detectable level. And in the way are billions of stars bigger than the sun exploding with forces we

Another waste of time and money

[bsercombe72]

Let's not put the cart before the horse eh? I think you need to worry more about finding and decoding their signals before composing any of your own. As others have said, our signals are already out there, so any ET within 100ly potentially already knows how tasty we are.

Re:Another waste of time and money

[mangu]

our signals are already out there, so any ET within 100ly potentially already knows how tasty we are.

Only for extremely, utterly low values of potential.

To put things in perspective, think of how difficult it is to detect extrasolar planets. The planet's reflected light is nearly completely swamped by the star's light. Now think of this: the reflected light is as if all the surface of the earth were covered with sun panels converting light into electricity very efficiently and all the power generated in this way were used to transmit a signal.

If some alien civilization is capable of receiving our radio and TV signals at their planet, they certainly have means to know we are here even if we didn't send out any signal.

testing with the web, what a great idea

[OzTech]

> The protocol could be tested via a website

'coz we all know that the "Aliens" have high-speed web access.

Before you start laughing ...At least this explains a few things.

Re:Missed something...

[Spy Handler]

good idea, please go exterminate yourself now for the good of the universe... we'll follow you some time afterwards.

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll? Really? Obviously none of you have any real knowledge of Orson Scott Card.

I can find citations on the internet to support Card being homophobic. Can't (quickly) find one that says he's a white supremacist. Citation?

That said, I would agree that it's a troll because Ender's Game and some of Card's other work are iconic modern scifi, regardless of the author's personal views.

[posting anon because I've already used a mod point, although not on the OP.]

ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Rogerborg]

The galaxy should be ablaze with life. It would only take one spacefaring race to colonise the entire galaxy. It's only 100,000 light years across - that's do-able in a few million years even at sublight. Heck, Earth is primo real estate - it should have been colonised, maybe several times over, by BEMs.

So, where are they?

Either no spacefaring race has evolved, anywhere, ever, or they evolved and died out - across the whole galaxy.

When you start to think about what could cause a spacefaring race to "die out" on a galactic scale, well, maybe we shouldn't be shouting out "Here we are!" into the void.

Smarter BEMs, if they exist, have probably figured this out, and are listening, quietly. Maybe even listening to our transmissions, to see what happens to us.

Paranoid? Yes. But the alternative is to believe that we are truly unique, which is racial solipsism of the highest order. Pick your mental poison.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[AmiMoJo]

There was some serious debate about this in the 80s. People saw the potential to wipe out an entire planet with relativistic bombs and came to the conclusion that hiding is the best policy.

A relativistic bomb is where you accelerate something to a fraction of the speed of light and slam it into a planet. Something the size of the Space Shuttle at 20% light speed would be more powerful than every nuke on the planet combined. A 1km diameter asteroid at 90% the speed of light would atomise everything on the surface of the earth and reduce it to a vast sandy wasteland with patches of glass where it had fused in the heat. The top 10m of the seas would boil off too. Such a bomb will be within our means to make in the next 100 years because basically all it needs is some kind of self-fuelling engine (ideally Bussard ramjet) and guidance system.

If one civilisation sees another there is a risk that the other could decide they are a threat and send a reletevistic bomb, so the only seemingly logical choice when you entire planet is at risk is a pre-emptive strike.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Kjella]

In theory, but then look at practical reality... our fastest space probes would take something like 70000 years to reach the nearest star. We don't have a clue how to build machinery that lasts that long, any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level. It doesn't matter how long time we have on us, today's Earth tech couldn't do it even if we accepted that travel time.

There's zero economic incentive of doing it, the chances that an interstellar colony would produce anything valuable for earth is extremely unlikely. At best it's information if we managed to establish cutting edge science somewhere, but the round trip on any communication is a decade or more.

Seriously, ask yourself how far humanity would have to advance before we'd actually start doing it - not just in the theoretical "if we throw all our resources at it we might" but in practical terms would. I mean we haven't even been to the moon in ages. We know Mars is probably within reach if we spend billions. But we don't, and neither would we spend trillions to colonize some rock 1000 years down the road.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Gaygirlie]

The galaxy should be ablaze with life. It would only take one spacefaring race to colonise the entire galaxy. It's only 100,000 light years across - that's do-able in a few million years even at sublight.

A) The Milky Way ain't the only galaxy in the universe. There most likely is life somewhere but it may or may not be in this galaxy.
B) It takes A LOT of time, effort and resources to colonize even one country, not to mention a complete planet. A lot, lot more than it takes to just travel the distance between the two end-points.
C) Colonizing even half a galaxy would take quite a bit more than "a few million years."

Heck, Earth is primo real estate

Only if you happen to breath oxygen and otherwise the atmosphere is suitable for your species. If not then no, it's not "primo real estate."

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[WillKemp]

Either no spacefaring race has evolved, anywhere, ever, or they evolved and died out - across the whole galaxy.

Or we live in the arse end of the galaxy and nobody can be bothered wasting their time coming here!

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[andydread]

The bottom line is nature is nature and resources are limited. I really don't think any creature that would risk traveling here would want to be "friendly" to us inferior creatures on this planet. Just take a look at it on a smaller scale. A planetary scale rather than a galactic scale. Are humans "friendly" to the "inferior" creatures here on earth? Do we try to figure out how to communicate with them before we clear a forest and setup our own habitat? We don't generally try to feel sorry for the things living in the trees we bulldoze and build. That is nature. If we humans had the capacity for interplanetary travel like we do for intercontinental travel then would our ways change? Or would we just bulldoze the forests there too and setup camp? Why would other creatures be different? Why would they care about us earthlings when resources are so scarce? I think people should heed the warnings of Hawkins in this respect. The fantasy that a more advanced entity coming to this planet feeling "sorry for us" and showering us with advanced tech, but they need our resouces? well its just that a fantasy. They would just simply clear and build.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Keen Anthony]

You're forgetting another possibility: that a spacefaring race is aware of us and has decided they aren't interested in knowing us. There's precedent here on earth for hermit civilizations. We might say: "Well, a spacefaring race wouldn't be hermits." Okay, but they could be a bunch of idiots they'd rather not know. There's a precedent for this in my very own neighborhood.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[TwistedPants]

The alternative is to believe there is a mistaken assumption in your model. Perhaps somewhere between chemicals rubbing up against each other and the potential evolution of a human like intelligence.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[MichaelSmith]

But due to a terrible misjudgement of scale their relativistic bombs are studied as cosmic rays.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[MichaelSmith]

..but they should at least be talking. Soon it may be cheaper to beam ourselves from planet to planet so aliens could do this as well. If anything space craft are redundant when information can be transmitted much faster.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[MichaelSmith]

A) The Milky Way ain't the only galaxy in the universe. There most likely is life somewhere but it may or may not be in this galaxy.

But why not elsewhere in this Galaxy? We know now that there are plenty of planets at a habitable range from their stars. Our solar system seems pretty favourable however based on what we can see there should be equally favourable solar systems within 1000 light years or so. The process of kick starting microbial life doesn't seem to have been just a stroke of luck. It happened on earth pretty much as soon as conditions were suitable.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[gforce811]

I saw that TV show too!

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Gaygirlie]

But why not elsewhere in this Galaxy? We know now that there are plenty of planets at a habitable range from their stars. Our solar system seems pretty favourable however based on what we can see there should be equally favourable solar systems within 1000 light years or so. The process of kick starting microbial life doesn't seem to have been just a stroke of luck. It happened on earth pretty much as soon as conditions were suitable.

Indeed, that's a good question. But we simply lack the data to answer that with any certainty. Though, we DO know that there atleast has been microbial life on other planets, including Mars, and thus it's likely there is or has been on other favourable systems. The real question is why they didn't survive and what chances does such microbial life have to survive in any one galaxy.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Rakishi]

If something wanted to kill life in the galaxy we'd already be dead. It's not that hard really. Von Neumann probe with a decent AI or uploaded alien. With nothing more than light sails you can probably have one around every every single star in the galaxy in under a million years. If it detects something it doesn't like than it dumps a relativistic rock at it. Or maybe it constructs a rocket inside a gas giant and make the local sun go nova just to be sure. Or just covers the planet with fusion powered gray goo till waste heats turns the whole surface into slag.

No, the truly frightening thing is that we're still here. A Von Neumann sterilizer is easy to make, you'd figure some species or faction of a species in this galaxy would have made one in the billions of years the Earth has existed for. I can easily imagine a nut job human launching one covertly in the next few centuries. Maybe just to see if it's possible. Yet we're still and so maybe something has allowed that to happen by stopping any such galactic menaces.

So I don't think it matters what we do. There's likely something lurking and watching us already which no species before us has managed to overcome.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[gtall]

Nice theory, but I've talked to aliens. Put quickly, the Earth and its inhabitants are simply too boring for their interest.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[sorak]

Or maybe we just have nothing worthy of their attention. If galactic travel is possible, we cannot assume it is cheap. We may be talking about groups spending generations in transit, just to find that they are now in some backwater planet, full of people who mostly just want to kill them and take their stuff, and, oh yeah, if they ever get back home, by then, the generations of separation may have caused just enough evolutionary differences to make them have difficulty mating with their own people.

But, on the bright side, they got some books, DVDs and blue jeans, and learned a little about how one culture lived before inventing extra-solar travel.

Or, they may be waiting until we have a work force technologically advanced enough to refine and create useful materials. (Take that ominously, if you wish).

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Xyrus]

There are several possibilities.

Space travel could just be so expensive and consume so many resources that the civilizations decided it wasn't worth it. They may send out advanced robotic probes instead.

Earth may be primo real estate, but aren't exactly in the bright center of the galaxy. Anything this far out may be considered not worth going after. This also makes the assumption that a race is interested in populating the galaxy, which may not be the case.

We could be the first intelligent race in this galaxy. In which case, life could exist in plenty of other places but we just wouldn't know it.

We could be yet another intelligent race to form in this galaxy, and will at some point destroy ourselves before reaching space travel like the others did.

Galactic or star system events don't allow enough time for a space faring civilization to develop (asteroids, radiation bombardment, etc).

They could be out there listening and watching, but otherwise mask their presence. If they've mastered interstellar space travel then they would most likely have tech that would allow them to come down on Earth and poke around without ever being detected.

Any such intelligent species may be so far beyond us that the really do look at us as nothing more than ants, and therefore not worth their time.

So on and so forth.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[DigiShaman]

Two words: Time Compression.

Since the dawn of human civilization, we have been more and more productive with our time. We strive to accomplish more activities and goals within the same unit of time here on Earth. We do this because we know our lives are mortal. While we have made a lot of progress toward extending our physical age, we've made even more progress at doing more with time. Everything from our ability to travel by airplane to sending IMs halfway around the world are prime examples.

My point in all this is that we as a species are focusing more toward inner space than outer space. While it's our nature to expand and explore to the outer most regions, most of that energy will always be focused toward the direction that yields the best results for the effort we put into it. Given the natural laws of nature that we understand today, I'm not so sure trekking thousands of light-years just to reach the nearest star is worth it. I'm thinking like most life in the universe, we too will forever be planet bound hear on Planet Earth. Our home.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[borsi]

When you start to think about what could cause a spacefaring race to "die out" on a galactic scale, well, maybe we shouldn't be shouting out "Here we are!" into the void.

"Yes, Reapers. We have dismmissed that claim."

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[m50d]

We don't have a clue how to build machinery that lasts that long, any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level.

I don't think that's entirely true; there are plans for interstellar ships (Orion?) buildable with current technology. With nuclear pulse propulsion, 0.1c is entirely feasible, and so a pseudo-generation ship could make it to a nearby star more-or-less within a human lifetime.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[DerekLyons]

Either no spacefaring race has evolved, anywhere, ever, or they evolved and died out - across the whole galaxy.

Or maybe your assumptions are incorrect.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[wdef]

We don't know what they might value, where they are or what technology they have evolved. Enough said.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[jwhitener]

Every watched SG1 and/or Atlantis? (And hundreds of other sci fi examples of ascent)

What if they spread out, evolved spiritually to pure energy, and now are all around us, but don't interact because we are (too young, unintelligent, barbaric, etc.. etc..)
What if they spread out, wiped the universe of all life, died out themselves due to some massive disturbance in the galaxy, and a billion years has passed so no trace is left?
What if they are spread out, living well, but with sufficient technology to hide their presence, and the presence of others from us?
What if they created this universe for us, and live in many parallel universes? see biocosm (really interesting book)

For every "why can't I see them right now!" there are tons of reasons why we might not see them. Many of which, I bet we cannot even conceive of yet.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[wdef]

any interstellar craft is still on the highly speculative "if we get a fusion / anti-matter drive" level.

You mean 'based on our current physics', which we know is only a small part of the story of reality because of its critical fundamental problems in eg reconciling QM and Relativity or in, say, fully accounting for dark matter. So we know that there is a deeper physics, we just can't get hold of it yet. Who knows what technology that new physics will yield and what current precepts it will shatter.

Look how far physics and engineering have come in the last 100 years. We have accrued far more technology in that time than in the entire period from the dawn of humanity up to that point. I think it's not unreasonable to assume that a better physics exists and we will eventually find it.

Any alien civilization that has thousands or millions of years more scientific achievement than us will very likely have found this improved physics. Who knows what that might give them. It's naive to assume that an advanced civilization could not have cracked interstellar travel somehow.

This is why we have science fiction. Most technology has been imagined in some form before it was possible for it to exist. Much of it could not even be imagined beforehand. We need to use our imaginations when thinking about advanced aliens. Either: (a) they don't exist yet and we are the first; or (b) they are there but are only at about our level of development; or (c) they are hiding from us or haven't found us; or (d) any kind of interstellar travel is not practical and there just isn't any more powerful space technology to evolve.

Of these 4 options, I'd say (d) is the least likely based on our own astonishing development in the last 100 years.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[Intrepid imaginaut]

A relativistic bomb is where you accelerate something to a fraction of the speed of light and slam it into a planet. Something the size of the Space Shuttle at 20% light speed would be more powerful than every nuke on the planet combined. A 1km diameter asteroid at 90% the speed of light would atomise everything on the surface of the earth and reduce it to a vast sandy wasteland with patches of glass where it had fused in the heat. The top 10m of the seas would boil off too.

The general understanding I have of these is that relativistic bombs could never work, since they would be torn to shreds by the interplanetary medium long before they hit the target. At the very best, they would be impossible to steer accurately for similar reasons.

Re:ShutUpShutUpShutUpShutUp

[caywen]

It could just be that in the eons it might take to discover how to travel and communicate over more than a couple of parsecs, searching for ET's becomes a really, really boring topic. Perhaps creating new universes and playing god is more fun.

Ponderous

[falken0905]

Is the time approaching when we will need to communicate with our coming alien overlords? Gosh, I hope they are vegans!

We could be unseen and should *not* be messaging

[wdef]

I agree with Stephen Hawking. Blasting messages willy-nilly at possible alien civilizations is foolhardy in the extreme. I have taken the liberty of anticipating and responding to the usual criticisms of this risk management approach below.

We have absolutely no reason to assume that contact with an advanced alien intelligence will be beneficial or that such aliens will be benign. Human history has taught us that, in contact between civilizations where one is technologically advanced compared to the other, the less advanced civilization always comes off worse. Our cuddly CE3K fantasies are just anthropomorphic projections. We have no reason to assume that the contacted aliens will possess human traits like compassion or altruism - in any case, many humans suspend or don't exhibit these. Think wartime atrocities. And we have treated other species on our own planet appallingly. Why should aliens be any nicer than us? The old chestnut "oh but they wouldn't have survived technological adolescence without destroying themselves if they weren't cuddly and nice" is just bollocks and is another anthropomorphic projection.

"Oh but they can't visit us via interstellar travel because it's impractical and too slow". Only according to our limited physics, which can't even reconcile QM with Relativity yet. It's likely there is a better physics and we don't have it yet but they do. Who knows what technology that might allow. Even our own scifi has more imagination that this.

"And our planet/system has nothing they need. It's not economic for them". Another supposition based on - what, exactly? How do we know what they value or what power sources they have? Humans as slaves or pets or pet food or as petri dishes for biological war experiments? How do we know? Humans place high values on some quite low value things. Diamonds are in abundance but we stockpile these to keep the value high.

If we must project onto aliens from our own psyches and earthly experiences, then to be safe we should project from the very worst of these. Our Independence Day, Twilight Zone and Borg/Dalek nightmares need to be considered seriously if we are to adopt a risk management approach. And a risk management approach is wise. It says don't contact them until we know who/what they are.

"They can see us anyway". According to http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1427054 background noise in space might limit the extent our radio transmissions have travelled to a 2 light year radius. Admittedly a better reference than 'Answerbag' might be good.

It is highly possible that most of our transmission are scattered or disrupted or all but destroyed at or around 2 light years out from us.Signal strength drops - at twice a distance away you are talking about 1/4 of the power - at ten times the distance the strength of the signal would only be one hundredth as great.

Even if this is not the case there is a very good chance we have not been spotted.

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[guyminuslife]

But he did write one or two good books.

I mean, Hitler's book was *terrible*.

Reminds me of the time I talked to this old friend

[Anonymous Coward]

He and I went to high school together but he emigrated to Australia a few years after graduation. He works for a company called AMP now.

We messaged eachother online and exchanged stories about where we worked. I said I worked as a programmer for the corporation I was with at the time. He said he worked at AMP.

I asked "What is AMP?"

He replied: "AMP, man, AMP!"

So I said: "Alien messaging protocol?"

We haven't communicated again since.

Won't be necessary

[confused one]

Let us say, for argument sake, aliens come to visit. Why would a civilization, any civilization, expend such an enormous amount of energy and resources to travel from one star to another? It wouldn't be to talk. They're either looking for resources or expansion room. If first contact is a small ship and small crew... Don't worry. That was just a scout / surveyor crew. A colony ship, or fleet of ships, (aka an invasion force) will be along soon enough.

Re:Won't be necessary

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Or, maybe they would expend a large amount of energy just to talk. Last year I spent a couple thousand bucks, and two weeks hiking, to get to a stranger's house in New Zealand just to say hi and to talk. My primary motivation was that I knew the person existed, and I wanted to see what they were like. I had absolutely zero economic incentive, military incentive, or imperial incentive to visit them. Yet, I went anyways, just to talk (well, and to have a pint).

Anyways, the point is, when you live in a lifestyle where all your basic necessities are met, then sometimes, yes, you do things just to do them. It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to envision an alien society where their basic needs of sustenance and energy have been met (due to abundant technology) and, thus, when they see a curious pattern in the universe (like us), they say, "Hey, let's go see what that funny radio pattern is all about."

Or they could come to eat us. I really don't see any applicable evidence to suggest one outcome is any more likely than the other.

Re:Won't be necessary

[wdef]

We don't know what power sources they might have evolved after millions more years of science than we have. It may not represent a large expenditure to them.

It's not

[symbolset]

For one thing the problem with aliens is, they're ALIEN. As in not only don't have the cultural cues that help us communicate, but may not even operate on the same time scales. We don't share a cultural context. We have no common symbols except math. And if you ever knew a mathematician, you would realize why this is a problem. They trend toward atheism, atavism, solipsism, and otherwise being queer. They bear watching.

And then there's the assumption that aliens are friendly with xenoforms like us. I'm not ok with that because we're not even comfortable with Southern Baptists, let along people who talk in that sing-song gibberish that goes back East. Intelligent Algae? I dunno if I'll like 'em, or if they'll like me. I'm pretty sure I can get along with the intelligent crystals though, since pissing them off takes several thousand years.

Re:It's not

[Wagoo]

Don't they communicate by breaking legs and doing jigsaws?

Re:It's not

[mangu]

not only don't have the cultural cues that help us communicate, but may not even operate on the same time scales

That's a point that has been nearly ignored in science fiction. Except for Robert Forward's "Dragon Egg" I don't remember any story where the aliens' minds operated on a significantly different time scale from ours.

How likely would that be? Our brains work the way they do because they use the same nervous system that has been evolving for at least 600 million years. Had the first neurons in the Cambrian period been somewhat different perhaps our brains would work in a different way, which could be much faster or much slower than ours.

Re:It's not

[3vi1]

>> "Intelligent Algae? I dunno if I'll like 'em"

Oh come on - you haven't even tasted them yet.

Re:It's not

[eyrieowl]

I think it's exceedingly unlikely. Events happen in "real time", and a brain that operated vastly slower than ours would likely be at a severe evolutionary disadvantage because it would be unable to respond quickly to circumstances where quick action is warranted (flood, fire, storms...). There would be selective pressure to react faster, so you'd trend towards a faster species, even if you somehow started out "slower". On the other hand, it gets more challenging to be faster beyond a certain point, with diminishing returns, so you wouldn't expect the process to continue unabated. Their time scale might be different than ours, but I think it's unlikely it would be vastly so. However, their lifespans could be rather different, so their perception of the value of time could be quite different. That would be a cultural difference though, I think, not the barrier to communication that physically processing at a vastly different speed would be.

Re:It's not

[Migraineman]

Agreed. Also, consider Frank's Red Hot sauce ... goes well with damned near everything.

Re:It's not

[davester666]

Don't forget anal probes!

Re:It's not

[Culture20]

That's a point that has been nearly ignored in science fiction. Except for Robert Forward's "Dragon Egg" I don't remember any story where the aliens' minds operated on a significantly different time scale from ours.

As much as I am loathe to compliment it, Star Control 3's Xchaggers were an example of this, although it was poorly done; the player seemed to speak with one being, but they explained that a new speaker replaced the old one every minute as a new dynasty rose and fell.

Re:It's not

[FiloEleven]

What if they aren't anything like what we would classify as an organism? What if the rough equivalent of what we call a "brain" was manifested in a gas giant's weather system, or, as I think was posited in some SF book, a massive forest whose brainwaves were fire fronts?

OTOH, what if they are post-Singularity, living decades of simulated realtime during our lunchtime?

Time scale is a smaller barrier than being able to recognize truly alien life. Modes of communication are likely to be equally incomprehensible as such. It's entirely possible that there is virtually nothing but life in the universe; it's just too varied for us to recognize any kind significantly different from our own. It's sometimes been quite difficult historically to discern what's alive and what's not on our own planet, especially in environments different from those we are used to like caves (where speleothems can look eerily organic) and oceans (where some corals can look like plain old rock).

Re:It's not

[eyrieowl]

i don't think live evolves without challenges...without some sort of selective pressure. i don't believe it is simply emergent. so, maybe they'd have different selective pressures, but they'd still have selective pressures. and i don't think there's such a thing as a planet in stasis. the constant in the universe is change....at least until it expands enough and is old enough to finally reach absolute zero. :)

Re:It's not

[eyrieowl]

I don't believe that intelligence is emergent like that. I think it develops because it helps convey a survival advantage, not because it's the natural state of things. And the forest fires...I think there are far too many things which influence the path and genesis and demise of forest fires for them to make a useful mechanism for thought. It's flipping the utility of the "brainwaves" on its head. The brainwaves are the result of the actions of individual neurons, they're not governed by the weather, it's not like a brainwave ripples over the brain and then a new thought is generated where the shape of that thought is governed by whatever external forces controlled the dynamics of the brainwave.

I think science fiction is great for coming up with flights of fancy, but there's a lot of things we can imagine that require a suspension of disbelief and reality, where the real world has rules that can't just be imagined away.

That's just darling.

[Oricalchos]

Silly me, I thought I had a lot of time in my hands.

Important Diplomacy

[JoeThoughtful]

Us: We humbly welcome you to our solar system in peace!

Them: Cute, our food is trying to say something to us!

Us: Please don't hurt us!

Them: Aha, food with a message, kind of like the fortune cookies mentioned in their "All you can eat, galactic, we are here for your dining pleasure, Earth is number 1 your bestest restaurant," beacon they have been sending out for the last 100 years.

Us: I think you are looking for the dolphins ...

Them: We wish to start with the one you call Lucy. We have a good feeling we are going to love her as opening appetizer! And where is this so called Island of Gilligan?

Use OOXML

[gralzt]

Why not suggest to use OOXML? It's such a clear and simple format, I am sure the aliens will figure it out. :-)

Re:Use OOXML

[MichaelSmith]

And then they could tell us!

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Grygus]

Isn't your paranoid view of aliens just as anthropomorphic, though? You use as evidence Human behavior, but there is no reason to assume that will apply in any way. I'm also puzzled at how you are willing to grant these aliens the technology of FTL travel but not better telescopes. If you believe that aliens are as aggressive as we are, then arguably the safest thing to do is to preemptively present ourselves as a non-threat, just to avoid triggering a fear response. I do not find your position to be internally consistent.

Radio = Stone Carvings

[Wingsy]

I keep telling these SETI people that they're using the wrong media but they never listen. Communicating by radio is similar to cave drawings by my Neanderthal granpa. E.T. has long ago moved on to gravity wave communications, which are interference free, pass through anything, and with unlimited range. But since we have yet to build a receiver I guess EM is the only game in town.

Re:Radio = Stone Carvings

[multipartmixed]

Your analogy may be apt -- "Low-tech" does not means "does not work".

And you know what? We have seen cave drawings, and have even learned a few things about Neanderthals because of them.

So, it looks like they worked fine.

Re:Radio = Stone Carvings

[wdef]

Ummm. We don't have direct confirmation of the existence of any gravity waves yet, do we? So we don't know that these can be used for communication. Since in theory it takes massive energetic events to create gravity waves that could be detected at our scale these would be an expensive form of galactic scale communication.

I'm not saying it couldn't be the case or that there isn't another field that we don't know about that could be used for communication.

Spam

[Fuzzy Viking]

If the protocol is defined now, and made public, I cannot help imagining the final approach of our alien visitors, their messaging system flooding over with spam for V1agra, knockoff "time pieces" and urgent letters from Nigeria asking to use their off-world bank accounts...

Re:Spam

[FTWinston]

Given that the previous METI examples described in the paper include theremin music and 500 text messages submitted by the public, I don't think this would make things much worse than they already are.

Just use English

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Everyone understands English if you yell it loud enough. Visit a tourist area in the Third World and you will see what I mean. Should work for aliens, too.

On my last trip to Egypt, the guy who picked us up at airport spoke excellent English and German . . . he told me that he was also fluent in French and Russian, too. He had a university degree in Egyptology and Tourism. He was way too intelligent, and way too educated for his job. If I was in his place, I would also be out on the streets of Cairo protesting.

Re:Just use English

[Magada]

Did he offer his services as a guide/driver/interpreter as well? Did you accept? If so, it may be polite to write a letter of thanks to the Mukhabarat for extending you such a warm welcome.

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[clarkkent09]

Hmm, you need to provide some evidence there. I know he is against gay marriage but that doesn't even necessarily make him a homophobe, never mind a white supremacist.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Anonymous Coward]

Predation isn't necessarily an exclusively human trait. In fact, you might just say that's how things work. The nature of life, in general, is to accumulate resources in one way or another, and all it takes is *one* non-altruistic alien species to really f* things up here on Earth. And I think that even with an ideal radio telescope, the problem is that the background radiation eventually drowns out any possible resolution of signal. i.e. the variations in the signal are equivalent to random background fluctuation. Well, just my thoughts on it.

The earth isn't useful to interplanetary races

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the Earth contains a rather small fraction of usable volatile chemicals to be found in our solar system, and it contains them at the bottom of a rather steep gravity well.

The only life-forms interested in a planet are those that evolved on, and are unable to successfully live apart from, a planet. As soon as you have the technology to move through the solar system (let alone between star systems, throughout a galaxy, to other galaxies, other globular clusters or beyond within a relative short space of time) then you cease to need resources that aren't easier found floating in space within a much less intense gravitational field.

In terms of our own planet, we're the fly-ridden mud-squatting ignorant pygmies that live in the middle of a jungle, dress in poorly-tanned animal hides and know nothing about cell phones, the automobile, electricity, the atom, basic hygiene or writing. As such, only the barest fraction of space-bearing civilisations would actually want to come visit, and those that do would far rather stay out of sight and observe - if you haven't seen what happened when a photographer ignored the fact he was taking pictures of a wild pride of friggin' lions I suggest you google for it...if you have a strong stomach (or frequent /b).

Besides, if we take a look at the amount of UFO reports, even with a terrible signal to noise ratio, it may be non-zero.

Re:The earth isn't useful to interplanetary races

[wdef]

As I've said elsewhere, chemical resources may be irrelevant. We have no way of knowing what aliens might value. Humans often assign value in illogical ways dues to cultural or historical factors. There is an overabundance of diamonds yet we place a high value of diamonds - in fact, we manipulate that value to keep it artificially high. We splatter paint on a canvas and sell it for $100m. We find a new drug in a rainforest and mass synthesize it. Humans trying to guess what might be interesting to far advanced beings is like an ant trying to understand what we do with that canvas or drug.

LINCOS...anyone?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Instead of musing about a message protocol, they should rather spend their time learning and improving LINCOS. Freudenthal's system is still the de facto standard for communication with aliens but has only occasionally been worked on by enthusiasts and NASA employees. LINCOS is in dire need of an overhaul, including a more modern transcription notation, and the second volume has never been finished. The original book is hard to get and it takes a substantial amount of time just to get into the framework, and that's probably why they don't use LINCOS.

What?

[Haedrian]

What makes you think that if there are aliens that they'd even use the same Physical Layer?

Why is there the impression that if aliens exist they can communicate by changing the same environmental variables as we do ? Why are we even assuming that they discover the same technology, or that they use radiowaves to transmit over long distances? Maybe an alien race uses radiowaves for weapons, maybe they can actually see at those frequencies. I dunno, the fact we haven't seen any aliens yet doesn't help either.

So most of this is entirely useless - we are assuming that there is an alien race which is activly pointing some sort of sensor array at the sky - which isn't far away enough such that the transmission gets blocked or whatever, that actually understands the notion of communicating through radiowaves by changing amplitude or frequency or whatever, that they try to decode it as a binary message, and that they try to understand the convoluted mess our languages are.

Hell, I'm sure if you were to make up your own 'alien language' and transmit it back to Nasa, they'd just think its cosmic radiation or something.

a waste of time and money

[jmb1990]

If aliens do exist, whos to say there close enough to send messages to earth, even if they were why would they want to? Personally i dont believe in aliens so i think its a big waste of time and money attempting to communicate with something that doesn't exist..

Missing the point.

[Securityemo]

Isn't the fundamental question here to what extent the "fundamentals of conciousness and intelligence" is a function of the physical parameters of the universe? Eg., how alien to us could something we would recognize as an intelligent conciousness be?

That is *funny*. You think you *see* Orz but Orz are not *light reflections*.
Maybe you think Orz are *many bubbles* too. It is such a joke.
Orz are not *many bubbles* like *campers*. Orz are just Orz.
I am Orz. I am one with many *fingers*.
My *fingers* reach through into *heavy space* and you *see* *Orz bubbles*
but it is really *fingers*.
Maybe you do not even *smell*? That is sad.
*Smelling* *pretty colors* is the best *game*.

Re:Missing the point.

[geekgirlandrea]

Damn it, finally an SC2 reference on the first day in weeks I don't have mod points...

Twitter

[dkh2]

That's it.

All they want here is to re-invent Twitter. Or, is it FourSquare, or Angry Birds?

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[M8e]

Some people are against both gay and straight marriage. Are they homophobes and heterophobes?

prime numbers

[sourcerror]

Then send pulses with length ratios of prime numbers. These guys were however trying to encode a message, which is completely different.

Re:prime numbers

[Stooshie]

I know, but you have to start the message with something that both parties would recognise, use that to establish a common understanding (we understand prime numbers, you obviously do since you picked up on this, now we both understand that ooooo represents the concept of 5 things and using that knowledge to then try and convey more information about how we understand the world (starting with things like o+o=oo oo+o=ooo oo+oo=oooo oxo=o oxoo=oo ooxoo=oooo and so on which established new symbols and from there on start defining more complex symbols.

altruism

[sourcerror]

"There is every reason to believe that competition, war, and resources are universal."
And altruism too. Otherwise it's hard to build a society. Have you heard of the optimality of tit-for-tat?

Re:altruism

[wdef]

So we think. Based on our limited understanding of earth biology which may not extrapolate at all to beings based on some other biology altogether. The point is, we just don't know. So you want to bank the future of humanity on some educated guesses about alien life?

Re:altruism

[sourcerror]

"So you want to bank the future of humanity on some educated guesses about alien life?"

No, I want to bank on the future of humanity on proven mathematical theorems. Nothing to do with earthling biology.

THINK ABOUT IT: Ants talking to humans

[darthium]

Just think about it....a civilization capable of interestellar travel, would have a HUGE intelligence&knowledge advantage to humans .....an advantage far bigger of the one we have compared to ants... . Now think about this scenario....imagine humans are capable of developing a device that would allow us to communicate with ants....what would they say us? . 'I have to eat', 'I have to efecate', 'I have to port this food to our home'......how soon would be keep interested on their 'messages'? . Now think about us trying to talk to them......do you think they'd understand even the most basic notions about Science, Phylosphy, Art? . Don;t you think that something similar would happen with an advanced alien civilization trying to have communication with humans? What's you opinion?

We have known for a long time

[hesaigo999ca]

Certain attention from the governments brought upon certain conditions within the science commuity has already led to beliefs that they are in contact with aliens, if not are aware of alien presence and need more input as to how to proceed. Ceratin links between stories can be obtained if you dig deep enough.

My only concern is that a government (such as the US) would not abide by whatever rules are thought up by a NATO like body to deal with interworld species. I do think it will happen within the next 10 to 15 yeas, that something will be either leaked or that actual communication with a civ. will be attempted, and that this will probably lead to mass panic. If we get the protocal under wraps ASAP, it might be less dangerous then it would be if we ended up not knowing how to act, in such cases.

It's not quite like a grizzly where you roll and play dead, and 45% of the time they leave you alone!

Re: Time Scale

[TaoPhoenix]

Roger Zelazny can help. "The Great Slow Kings".

http://lib.ru/ZELQZNY/TheGreatSlowKings.txt

beepbeep. beepbeepbeep. beepbeepbeepbeepbeep

[Anonymous Coward]

beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep.

Of course if the aliens use Slashdot's message filtering the message won't get through anyway...

i.e., Hitler

[SteveFoerster]

So if first impressions matter, developing some standard protocol is kind of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. Impressions will have been informed on our early TV output. There could well be whole institutions on other worlds tasked with decoding the antics of Tom and Jerry. No wonder they've stayed away.

In the Flash Gordon movie from the '70s, this is how Ming discovered that the Earth had advanced enough to become a threat. There's a scene where he's reviewing scenes of Hitler, from among the earliest TV transmissions, and remarks, "He showed promise!"

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Riceballsan]

More advanced, more powerful other species has the same issues universal in almost every species. A cat meets a mouse, the cat imidiately treats the mouse as a toy torturing it for his own pleasure (with maybe a .01% chance of the cat ignoring or being friendly to the mouse). Now symbiotic relationships aren't unheard of in the animal kingdom, but those all require both animals having something to offer eachother, odds of us having something to offer a race that is more then a century above us technologically are slim and assuming they were peaceful non-warlike creatures, just watching our planet for a week would disgust them to the point they would want nothing to do with us.

Silly

[Steauengeglase]

The point should never be how to communicate with something that probably doesn't exist yet or died off before we humans came around, but having protocols that WE can use out there. Instead of some pie in the sky protocol, how about a better long distance approach to current CCSDS standards?

Re:Missed something...

[GameboyRMH]

If they have anywhere-near-similar intelligence to humans they'll have the same problems, unless perhaps they have a wildly different evolutionary history, like descending from a lifeform with no competition, or one that reproduces asexually.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Flambergius]

If we must project onto aliens from our own psyches and earthly experiences, then to be safe we should project from the very worst of these.

What else except our own psyches and earthly experiences could be possibly have?

Anyways, if the goal is to be as safe as possible, then there really is no need to project or in any way to think about what aliens might be like. Hiding is the safest option. However, if we're going to think about how advanced aliens might behave towards us, then we need to think about evolution of cognition. The evidence we have strongly suggests that rapid technological progress requires a society and a culture, which in turn rely on several "cuddly" cognitive abilities/tendencies like empathy, reciprocity, deferral of rewards and many more. You also have think about functional cognitive requirements of technology in an evolutionary context: many relatively autonomous and smart individuals, like us, or a hive-mind made of many stupid individuals, sort of like ants, or single huge and hyper-smart individual, like nothing we've seen so far? Think about the communication overhead that a true hive-mind or a central intelligence would have compared to decentralized intelligence and anthropomorphic way of doing things starts look like a good bet.

Projecting is bad, but we're not limited to just projecting. We don't understand our own cognition fully, but we do understand some of it and we do understand large parts of evolution. Those do give us an insight into functional aspects of aliens. (And no insight into what it is like to be an alien. :-))

Same old formula

[GameboyRMH]

There will always be serious debate that aliens have succumbed to $human_issue[$decade] during $decade.

80s = Cold war = aliens nuked each other.

2000s = climate change, social media, wars of aggression* = aliens destroyed their planet, are too busy with EyestalkBook or Zleeblaxian Idol, would murder our asses anyways.

Those are just a couple I know of. Anyone care to contribute more?

In fact let me take a few wild-ass guesses and see if I get any right:

70s = Vietnam war = aliens too busy fighting unwinnable war

60s = hippies = aliens too stoned to care/coming over to party and share awesome space drugs, space music and space booty

40s = WW2 = aliens too busy fighting each other

20/30s = depression = aliens' economy collapsed

*Not that I totally agree, but I think this is what's behind Hawking's warning that aliens would be dangerous warmongers.

Re:Suggestion for a protocol

[confused one]

What did you say? Lasers? Lasers can't even penetrate our navigation shields.

Why bother!

[rocker_wannabe]

The aliens will probably decode our video signals before anything else and if they see any of the "reality shows" they'll know were not worth communicating with.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Sentrion]

... arguably the safest thing to do is to preemptively present ourselves as a non-threat, just to avoid triggering a fear response...

I have the solution: When the aliens land we will visit them with baskets of food and fuel and even show them how to grow their own crops on our planet. We can call the event "Thanskgiving" or something like that. I heard it went over really well the last time a peaceful primitive people used this strategy.

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[Coren22]

No point in replying to the AC below.

Being against gay marriage has nothing to do with homophobia, marriage is a religious ceremony, I have no problem calling it a civil union, and in fact civil unions should be opened up to non romantic relationships as well. What you do in your bedroom or house should be your responsibility, not the state's, not the church's, but yours.

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[h4rm0ny]

Yes. He's an excellent writer and Ender's Game in particular was a favourite book of mine as a child. That said, is there any particular reason for an arbitrary Ender reference jammed into TFS? Is the editor just trying to pad it out or something?

Something generic, humm,..

[thorFlea]

Sort of like dog sniffing?

UDP

[PPH]

Because I'm not waiting around for the ACK.

On a related note: This is just an excuse for W3C to begin work on HTML6.

A truly bad idea

[mikein08]

Think about it. Suppose we make contact somehow with a truly hostile race of aliens. Suppose they trace those messages back to the source. I leave the rest to your imagination.

CosmicOS

[Phleg]

This project already exists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CosmicOS

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[rubycodez]

our higher creatures kill, even killing their own kind (humans, chimps, big cats, bears, etc.). No reason to think it would be different anywhere else, limited resources and ensuring the "right" genes get propagated means creatures often are killers. with the activated elements from decades of nuclear explosions still in our atmosphere, we might have already lost in the "present ourselves as non-threat" department

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[rubycodez]

thanks Hindmost, spoken like a sane puppeteer.

Everyone Knows Aliens have adopted...

[strangeattraction]

Everyone knows Aliens have adopted Esperanto as an Intergalactic language. It is the one thing Humans have unknowingly contributed to the intergalactic community.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[wdef]

When dealing with the totally unknown, paranoia is justified. We might think that there are good justifications to extrapolate the evolution of compassion etc to alien societies *based on our studies of earth biology*. Let's assume that is correct.

The problem is, as I pointed out, good 'ol cuddly humanity's own horrific record of genocide, species annihilation and environmental degradation should give us pause. Slavery has existed throughout human history. We have been unsuccessful in stamping out genocide and torture and are unlikely to ever be at this rate.

So, even if we insist on using an earth/human model for aliens in this regard and claim that they must have evolved compassion, we also have to remember that the same logic implies they may have similar problems to us. Or that, when we make contact, we may be contacting a rogue or pirate element of an alien society that does not play by any rules. Just like our own rogue elements.

We can only speculate and cannot imagine with certainty how aliens might have evolved - in fact as you say we cannot imagine through other than the parochial lens of our earth consciousness and biology which could be drastically different to theirs. Even assuming they have compassion as we know it and are not so far advanced that we appear insignificant, like ants, we better hope that they are NOT like flawed humanity with our penchant for species annihilation and cruelty.

Ergo: sending messages is really, really stupid no matter how you look at it. We should shut up and keep listening.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[wdef]

If we are going to assume they're cuddly then we must also assume they could be prone to the same evils as us. I'm imagining the worst case scenarios and in that I am quite consistent. That is how you assess how bad the risk might be. It's called risk analysis. If the consequences are severe enough - I'd call human annihilation potentially severe - then even an outside risk means we should not be yelling out heads off at alien civilizations.

Worst case scenario: (1) they have no equivalent of 'compassion' or 'empathy' towards humans; (2) they have far advanced space travel or weaponry making hostility possible; (3) we have something they have some use for; (4) they see us and come hither.

By contrast, people who insist on yelling "we're here!" are in effect taking the "oh, naw, it *has* to be like this" best case optimistic scenario: (1) they're cuddly beings who'll just love us to bits and who'll want to link cultures and sing Kumbaya and who have no rogue elements; (2) over some thousands or millions of years they have not cracked deep physics any better than we have [certainly unlikely] and are stuck with sublight travel or chemical propulsion; (3) there could be absolutely nothing we have that they are interested in; and (4) they've seen us anyway so we should beam them messages.

The problem is that the costs associated with shutting up are zero and the risks greatly reduced. The risk associated with sending up beacons and flags, however, could just mean the annihilation of humanity.

It's a no brainer. We should shut the f*ck up

first need to build a radio transmitter...

[k6mfw]

... to be considered intelligent. A criteria SETI has for extraterrestrial intelligence is that they have to build a radio transmitter. Seth Shostak has fun with this as he says to evaluate if person next to you is intelligent. Ask them, "Do you know how to build a radio transmitter?"

Just send a sequence of primes

[Bruha]

Prime numbers would be easy to detect by any advanced races, it's devoid of any religious and political overtones as well. It's about as neutral a message as you can get.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[wdef]

you can't achieve that type of technology if you're not a social species. If requires cooperation on a massive scale.

So we think, based on our limited "understanding" of potential alien life. What if the alien is not a society but a single massive intelligence or rogue societal element or pirate? Just because they/it have achieved cooperation does not mean they want to cooperate with us. We can't even cooperate with ourselves for God's sake.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[wdef]

Also: only a relatively tiny proportion of humanity actually cooperates to develop science and technology. The numbers required are not that large over a long period of time.

Message length

[Culture20]

I propose 140 characters. Just remember that "@E" might be an emoticon in their language.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[commodoresloat]

The ultimate in security through obscurity!

Re:Orson Scott Card? Give me a break.

[geekgirlandrea]

I know he is against gay marriage but that doesn't even necessarily make him a homophobe, ...

Except, yeah, it pretty much does.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[wdef]

All that is irrelevant if an alien intelligence is not an aggregation of individuals in the sense that we think we know it.

In Soviet Russia...

[twebb72]

In Soviet Russia, aliens message you!!!

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Isn't your paranoid view of aliens just as anthropomorphic, though?

If he's wrong, we lose nothing. If he's right, we gain everything.

Re:We could be unseen and should *not* be messagin

[Grygus]

No, we don't; this is a point I forgot to make. If he is right then when aliens come, the side with the higher tech level will decide what happens next, probably in light of their own self-interest, regardless. Our actions up until then will be irrelevant in the face of the technological gap.

Making all decisions based on fear is no way to exist.

Message Length

[imscarr]

All messages shall be 42 bits in length

Re: Time Scale

[Pechkin000]

LOL that was an entertaining read. Thanks for that