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Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval
Lucas123 writes "The problem: What do you leave behind that billions of years from now, and without context, would give aliens an some kind of accurate depiction of mankind. The answer: A gold-plated silicon disc with just 100 photos. That's the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months from Kazakhstan and orbit the earth for 5 billion years. The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format, were chosen over a five-year process that involved interviews with artists, philosophers, and MIT scientists, who included biologists, physicists, and astronomers. To each, was posed a single question: What photos would you choose to send into outer space? The answer became an eclectic mix of images from pre-historic cave paintings to a photo of a group of people taken by a predator drone."
The point of the Rosetta Stone was that it contained translations of the same passage into a mixture of languages we understood and ones we didn't. It could then be used as a key to understand the languages that we couldn't yet translate. An equivalent for this would be a passage in English, and two translations of it into languages read by aliens five billion years into the future. So, no.
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the only way to see the pictures is if you buy the book. thanks world for not being so cool as during and after the space race.
Yeah, it's an assumption, and it's perhaps not a 100% certanity that it is correct.
But I think we can agree that the odds of some alien race being familiar with the concept of integers, is a lot higher than the odds that they'll understand english.
To understand elements and chemical reactions you need to know how many protons an atom has, which requires knowledge of integers. Atoms are also discrete units, again integers. Even from an astronomical point of view planets and stars for distinct countable (integer) units. If we find aliens they may not understand integers, but if aliens find us they would pretty much have to have all the mathematical and scientific knowledge we do (and a lot more) to get here.
Unless of course said aliens are a sentient cloud of energy / Boltzmann brain, but the laws of physics seem to like to combine common elements into the same organic molecules that life on earth uses, so it seems likely that relatively familiar carbon based live would also evolve on other planets.
Plus at least simple counting has been shown in many animals, even those only distantly related to primates, so it's not like humans are even the only species on earth that can count integers.
> No it is not. Math itself is universal, but Mathematical Notation is a human contrivance which has no meaning without a frame of reference
That is not entirely correct.
*Symbols* are universal -- which is why you dream in them and not a language or math.
Math IS symbol *manipulation* using certain rules that are based on assumptions. Fortunately ALL of math is based on *assumptions*; regarding how to define integers and how to manipulate them can be easily expressed and almost universally understood; you don't *need* to express "higher" math such the arbitrary rules such as negative exponent rules. The abstract assumptions are "context" free.
First pick a generic set of symbols that represent *sequence* and *addition*. This also demonstrates the fact that you understand primes. (Ignore the underscores, they are for spacing...)
Demonstrating the Goldbach's conjecture
Of couse one could demonstrate sub, mul, div, etc. but the above is sufficient.
Slashdot's lame-ass filtering is retarded for posting math, code, and alignment.