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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.
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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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.
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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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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
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.
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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Voyager's pictures are here:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/sceneearth.html
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.
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.