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How To Make Messages Easy For an Alien Race To Understand (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: The screen on that new cellphone has amazing pixel density, color vibrance, and refresh rate. The high-end headphones you just picked up do an amazing job reproducing sound. These devices interface extremely well with humans but might not be very good modes of communication for an Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Sure, we haven't made contact with alien life yet. Even if they did pick up our broadcasts or space probes the relatively narrow-range of audio (narrow and low frequency), visual (slow refresh rate), and data transmission methods are likely to make no sense to non-human entities. The Voyager Golden Record took a fascinating approach to making some data available to new civilizations; it's interesting to think of other ways we might communicate with beings of fundamentally different biology.
TFA (not the linked wikipedia article) basically just asks the question, "what if an alien's sensory systems (vision and hearing) were far more acute than ours?", and then gives a rather superficial answer to that question. TFA seems to be trying to make the argument that if an alien's vision or hearing were better than ours, the alien would not be able to comprehend our electronic visual displays or sound reproductions. The argument is not convincing at all, though. After all, we have color vision, but black and white media still works quite well for us.
TFA also makes some rather silly statements, such as, "With its advanced hearing, perhaps the Oculako [TFA's name for the alien] even transmits complex data by sound." Yeah, humans already do that, every day. Human speech is pretty good tool for transmitting "complex data by sound." Or, for a technological example, how does the author think fax machines and telephone-line data modems work?
Finally, the title of the Slashdot summary is "How To Make Messages Easy For an Alien Race To Understand", but TFA doesn't even attempt to answer that question. In fact, the article ends with this: "...it’s a very difficult problem to come up with an interspecies communication mechanism. ... Given the technological advances since the 1970s how would you design this era’s golden record?" And that's it. The closest TFA comes to the question is asking the reader how he or she would solve it.
Aliens that find us will probably be so much more advanced than we are, they'll put us in their zoo, or they'll eat us. There should be a law against contacting intelligent alien life forms.
no, I don't have a sig
It's the same sort of thing that feeds religion and "The Secret"-type worldviews: if you want something to exist enough, if you really want something to occur with all your heart, then surely it will exist, surely it will occur.
Basically, "magical thinking".
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
Honestly, from a discovery standpoint, I don't think we could care any less about those species.
We, ideally, WANT to discover an alien species that CAN communicate back, a species that have developed external intelligence rather than internally.
We want a species that has worked their world, has developed similarly to ours.
Sure, it would be fantastic to find ANY life out there, but the priority is those that can send us a "piss off ya wanker" back to us.
All of those other lifeforms that can't communicate back would be no different to bacteria, in the end. They could be as intelligent as they want, still doesn't change the fact they can't communicate for shit.
Look at Dolphins, incredibly intelligent creatures, but due to the fact they live in the water, they haven't really developed much externally simply because they can't.
A water life is anti-external-development. You can't do anything in water. All they can do is develop internally.
It'd be great to learn about the cultures of other species like this, and as we speak, we have been attempting to create bridging languages with dolphins for many years now, and it is fairly successful. But like any species, there are different dialects, different languages.