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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."
That way they will be tricked into thinking that we look just like them and hopefully they wont be as hostile as some movies predict.
Anyway, I for one, welcome our new gold prospecting overlords!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
"Sir! We have a lot of pictures!"
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
"But Sir!"
"I SAID, leave them alone! Haven't you heard of biogenic-nuclear copyright licenses? Without the antidote we'd all die."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We should just send up pictures from 4 chan.
Then the universe will leave us alone.
It'll be gone long before then. If you figure that it only costs a few tens of millions for a private individual to launch a satellite, returning requires more fuel and heat shielding, but that's not too much more. Considering that artifacts only increase in value, the cost of "recovery" only decreases, the only thing that can happen to save it from some billionaire with questionable ethics is if there's so much junk up there that nobody even cares it exists.
That's exactly what they did. Sadly unsurprisingly the summary got it wrong. See this picture:
http://creativetime.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Disc_001.jpg
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I prefer the Voyager discs. They provide a more positive look on mankind. These photos look more like a guilt trip.
Designed to last for 5 billion years? Won't it and the Earth be one with the sun in about 3 or 4 billion?
Anyway, I think we should baffle the aliens with a bit of bullshit and have a set of pictures that are screenshots of the Death Star destroying Alderaan. Hilarity ensues when word gets out about this and aliens from all over the galaxy scramble to tear up our long dead world in search of any useful information about this tech that allowed the great and ancient civilization that thrived here to build a space station with enough firepower to destroy an entire planet.
This space unintentionally left blank.
My first question on this concept would be, "Why would the hypothetical aliens expect to find a message from us to them in orbit, and look there amongst all the other orbital junk?"
Seems that the most natural thing to expect would be that one should look for informative objects where the culture lived, for which, off the top of my head, "encasement of pictures in a huge block of plexiglass, on Earth" seems more likely to actually be discovered. This seems akin to a historical human culture saying, "We want to make sure that future people know about us and what our ways were, so let's walk 500 miles away from where we live and all our buildings are, and put some paintings up in the mountains."
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Why do people love stroking their ego so much? Is it so hard to comprehend that in terms of the universe our lives are completely meaningless?
It's "more space junk." If there was this lone object in orbit? Okay maybe. But we're talking about our planet with lots of stuff up there now. LOTS of stuff. And then meteor showers and crap?
And even if somehow this one trinket found its way into the hands/claws/tentacles of a being from space, are they supposed to be convinced of something? I mean really. Oh look, among all this stuff, there are creatures out there... sending some kind of message... I will go visit them!
"Mixed message" is the best we've got? And for fuck's sake... we've got actual people in orbit... people to talk to.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Without the context of human perception and aesthetics, many of these images may appear as random noise to an alien species!
Abstract artistic expression works for some of us, but might not be communicating directly enough to clearly convey ideas, concepts, facts, history, even human being's notions of beauty, the latter of which clearly was the curator's primary objective.
I'm not knocking the images themselves. But without the context of human eyes, human life and experience... these will have little or no meaning to anyone who has never lived earth.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
The Rosetta Stone only worked because they knew two languages of the three on the stone. Aliens would most likely not know *any* language we have.
I assume you would start the list off with some Mathematical/scientific language which is capable of being deciphered by aliens. Also the more probable people(ish) beings to make use of this would be descendants trying to decipher our long lost languages in some post apocalyptic world.
I quickly browsed the images and had a couple thoughts.
1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?
2) I really didn't think the choice of photos was representative of life on earth. No cityscapes, no human faces close up, no animals / pets (inter-species friendship for example), no image of something technological such as a state of the art mobile phone / laptop. No images of agriculture or even a bouquet of beautiful flowers.
Hell, I could barely tell what some images were supposed to be (well, number 1 took a couple seconds - I thought it was a crystalline structure, number two I haven't figured out yet).
I did like earth from space, but how about an image of Armstrong / Aldrin on the moon? A passenger jet taking off showing outside & in?
So many choices, so poorly selected IMHO.
Don't belittle the above comment unless you have read a very SF good story called Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper.
It is even available for free:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19445/19445-h/19445-h.htm
Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:
Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.
I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.
Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.
I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.
And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?
For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Mathematical/scientific language
Spoken language is unique, but mathematical language is universal, for a start every alien capable of space flight will know what integers are. Once you've established symbols for numbers, you can match that to elements' atomic numbers, which aliens would also understand. Once you have elements you can start to show chemical structures and so on.
Don't you remember how they did it in [Contact](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/)?
Summary:
"The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format,"
Article:
"MIT used a machine to etch the photos into the silicon using a bitmap format to create a binary image."
This just illustrates what really pisses me off about journalism today. I spent a good half an hour looking for the actual source of the quotations and statements from the MIT guys. Most of the articles claim to be written by whoever posted them on their magazine/blog/newspaper, but here's the original interview that most of the articles are ripping their quotes from:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-last-pictures-interview-with-trevor-paglen/
I got this link from MIT: http://arts.mit.edu/va/artist/paglen/
I'm still trying to figure out where the information about "MIT used a machine to blah blah" came from, however. So far I haven't actually been able to track it back to anybody.
Maybe I'm browsing the project site wrong, but all I saw were about a dozen photographs? None show images of naked humans that can at least give a hint of what a human looks without the environmental protection suit. Photos of couples having sex and babies can also explain the nature of human reproduction. We're not androids that just rolled off the some fab lab.
The hops this satellite is going last 5 billion years at the orbit of 30.000 km is just nonsense. The orbit is too low and unstable at best, even if this is geosync orbit. He would have needed a orbit pattern of at least 600.000 km (outside the orbit of the moon) to get this goal. Outside forces are more likely to push the satellite towards Earth in few thousands years. Rather then from it. Orbital debris is also going to be a major problem in the long term.
Mathematical/scientific language
Spoken language is unique, but mathematical language is universal, for a start every alien capable of space flight will know what integers are.
not it they're using javascript
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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.
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.
That is how we see things. Regardless of whether we're right or not, an alien civilization could very well have come up with a theory that adequately explains chemical reactions that is completely different. To think otherwise is to succumb to your own bias.
Now, I agree that a space-faring civilization would most likely understand integers, but you can't possibly know that. The universe holds too many amazing things. We have only the tiniest understanding of it, and much of what we 'know' could very well be wrong.
Let's take a slight detour:
Imagine a species that evolved in space, rather than on a planet's surface. To meet our current definitions of life, they would need to be able to move around and interact with their environment, which means some sort of propulsion in space. If this species managed to make it to our planet, they could be very intelligent and still not necessarily have any need for integers or subatomic particles.
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.
True, but they also evolved on the same planet with the same conditions. You can't assume that alien life would be anything like the life forms on this planet. Some people think they might be, but we don't KNOW.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
If they are using javascript for space flight, all we'll need to do to defeat them is fly Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith up to their ship to infect them with NoScript.
They will have to understand math and integers, but not our textual representations of them.
So they'll have to figure out what the encoding is. Given that they need to build a spacecraft to even be able to get to the message in the first place, decoding shouldn't be totally beyond their powers. It might take them quite a while to do it, but why worry about that?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
So showing a picture of two marbles with a two below it then a plus sign and another photo with three marbles and a three below it an equals sign and a photo with 5 marbles and a 5 below it would certainly do the trick. There are only two conclusions that can be drawn from that that the = sign signifies subtraction and the + sign equals or that = signifies equal and + addition. A few more images using other operators and there would be no way that our basic operators could be misinterpreted. If a 10 year old can learn order of operations an intelligent life form that managed to fly across the galaxy should be able to handle the same thing. You could probably define our mathematical notation and order of operation in less then 30 expressions, that includes calculus.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
Why? Atoms are a model for the universe that comes from a mind that thinks in terms of countable quantities. A mind that thinks in terms of continuous values might discover quantum mechanics early on and regard atoms as probability distributions of different types of force.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
From the collection of photos shown on their website it would appear they were selected by an art student with an obnoxiously cynical view of humanity. The hold little meaning beyond this pervasive sense of negativity.
Let's take stock:
Before and after photos of melting glaciers
Grainy photo waves crashing on a pier with a bunch of people watching
Some random ship in what appears to be the Suez canal
An approaching dust storm during what I think is the dust bowl
Barely decipherable cave paintings
A mine
Some nonsensical photo of a huge auditorium with 7 tv screens depicting highway interchanges
A waterspout
A blurry photo taken by a drone (presumably pre strike)
Random kids standing in water, most looking away from the camera
A rather strange looking room that looks like something from colonial times
I'm a human and I see no rhyme or reason in these photos beyond what I mentioned above. What the hell is an alien intelligence going to make of these? I think this is a neat concept, but that's a rather pathetic selection of photos.
Not true. Jabba the Hutt spoke Subtitle.
> 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.