I played withe the SETI@home project for a while, I completed maybe twenty units but now there aren’t many ‘spare moments’ on my PC, so I’ve given it up.
Anyway, what would you send (content and method please) if you were composing a deliberate message to be broadcast into space as a ‘hey, here we are!’ message?
My take is that it has to:
[li]be clearly artificial[/li][li]contain information which can be universally understood[/li](Prime numbers are the most common suggestion here)
[li]be ‘self-extracting’[/li](a grid of ‘pixels’ with the number of pixels in each axis being a prime number has been used before, but maybe there are better suggestions)
[li]contain information about us.[/li](dunno about you, but if we were to recieve an intelligent signal from somewhere out there, after the initial excitement, I’d be a little disappointed if the message contained only a series of prime numbers.
I’m aware of a few of the messages that have been sent by various agencies in the past, but what would you send?
This is such an interesting question. This is tricky, because I’m tempted to strive for useful information. What would I want to know about another planet? I wonder though if it is impossible for any information to be truly useful to an alien culture. Perhaps it would be better to go with things that represent various aspects of the earth’s history and culture. I’m afraid I don’t know enough about broadcasting to be articulate about the method.
Do you think an archive of the SDMB would be too much? Egads, I am presuming above my station. We should just send Cecil’s books (plus the pit thread about Hitler and English food, the best thing I have seen here thus far).
In addition, I will nominate:
[ul]
[li]Some sort of map or globe of the earth (causing great political trauma, I fear, of deciding which way to position it)[/li][li]A snowflake crystal, so they will know we have water. Or at least, they will know we have snow. Maybe they ski.[/li][li]A periodic table of the elements. I don’t know why this strikes me as important, but it does. We should highlight the carbon, so they know we are carbon-based.[/li][li]A representation of a person. I don’t think it needs to be very specific, as the aliens will probably get the wrong idea anyway. I’ve seen something that shows a man, woman, and child … for all I know, they will assume we eat babies.[/li][li]A representation of a person sending this message, or at least, a person with a little talk bubble with the prime numbers in it. We wouldn’t want them to arrive and start talking to dogs.[/li][li]Something that shows us landing on the moon, so they will know we have very basic off-world travel.[/li][li]The pyramid with the eye from the back of a US dollar bill, so that when they get here, they can tell us what it means.[/li][li]A recording of bagpipe music, so that if they are aggressive, this will scare them.[/li][/ul]
Just for the sake of argument, why is it certain this is such a great idea? Maybe the earth is located in an obscure portion of the universe “out in the sticks” if you will, the equivalent of a Nice Place in the Country. Just food for thought.
Anyway, I think we are already sending rf energy out into space, intended or not. Maybe the aliens, if they exist, will want to be taken to Uncle Miltie and Bozo… grin
The premise seems faulty to me.
I think if you look at the length of time (aeons) we did very well without using radio waves, you’ll realize that there’s no particular reason to think another intelligence relies on them.
In fact, I would assume that “waves”, being enormously redundant as they are, will be superceded even by humans within my lifetime. “waves” rely on particles repeated in so steady a pattern that they are detectible by that alone. Why pump out that much radiation to convey so little information? I’d guess that in the future, we will be much more digital, just as digital electronics has replaced wave technology in TV and audio recording.
More to the point-why haven’t we heard their broadcasts? If it is theoretically possible for them to hear us we should hear them right? Which I suppose brings us right up against the Fermi Paradox.
As we haven’t heard anything it means that: 1. there are no other civilisations in the universe
2.there are no other civilisations in the universe that have developed technology, which, given the age of the universe is very unlikely (which is the whole point of the Drake Equation I believe)
3. We are being terribly chauvinistic assuming that any hypothetical alien civilisations would do the same as us and for the same reasons (and no I am not greeting any gemstones just because it’s number 3! )
4. The aliens know we are here but are ignoring us on purpose.
5. As Simulpost said, radio technology is probably not the only technology or even the most desirable technology, radio is probably ultra primitive to the ‘sophisticates’ in the universe.
I wanna hear the alien radio stations! That would be so cool!
“Uncle Miltie” and “Lucy” and all the other early TV have reached a sphere with a radius of 50+ light years.
Could an Aracibo-like receiver on a planet within this sphere detect such signals as artificial? Part of this question is, would they still be coherent (signal-wise, not content), or would they disappear into the background noise?
If detected, could they be deciphered, given earth-like technology? Given non-earth-technology? (that is, would they have to have something like our TV to figure out what to do with the signal?)
Although Fermi’s Paradox is persuasive, so is the Drake Equation. For Fermi, what if the Klingon version of “Lucy” started 70 years ago (or any detectable signal), but they are 100 light years away?
Similarly, if The Aliens detect “Uncle Miltie” and respond, if they are more than 25-30 LY away, the return mail hasn’t had time to get here yet.
Also check out the book Murmurs from Earth which details the choice of information sent on a satellite with a predicted orbital time in the millions of years, the Aracibo message, the Pioneer plaques, the Voyager records, and why those particular choices were made.
BWEEP We’re sorry, but the civilization you’re trying to contact has temporarily collapsed or is no longer in existence. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number of the planet you’re trying to contact and try your call again.
Serously, though, I’d have to say the Koyaanisqatsi series of films, just so that they get an honest picture of ourselves.
Well, considering how SETI efforts have been going in THIS planet, it seems broadcast media “leak-out” would be detectable, but not casually so – i.e. you have to be looking for signal in the right band. And yes, the first task IS picking a signal up from the background noise that looks like something. If, as in our case, it has been decided that the signal analysis will be conducted out of common folk’s PC’s in their spare time… well…
The noise is brutal, at the sensitivity level you require to pick up a casual broadcast at interstellar distances. (besides, with multiple stations in each continent broadcasting on the same channels at all hours of the day, we interfere with ourselves)
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Once they get a lock on the signal they should be able to determine it IS an artificial signal. But w/o any common frame of reference, “casual signal” detection (TV/Radio broadcast) would be hard to take beyond the “yeah, it’s something” phase. If they got Arecibo-class radio astronomy they should easily recognize what WE use as analog broadcast bands (AM(including SW), FM, TV) – but in their world that part of the EM spectrum may not be used at all as in Earth. Heck, EARTH doesn’t have one compatible TV standard. So signal recognition should not be that hard if they’re looking in the right band, figuring out the content would be a bitch. Eventually they’d run it into a CRT to see what happens, sure, but who knows what will show up on-screen. And any sound coming out of the speaker would certainly be incomprehensible gibberish to them (if its even audible to what passes for their “ears”!)
OK, casting aside for one moment the exact method of transmitting the data, the question is, what data would we send?
even the periodic table is a bit boring, isn’t it?
(are there other ways of arranging it that make just as much sense (in a hexagonal spiral for example))?
I would certainly want to be able to find out something interesting about an extraterrestrial culture; given the distances involved, two-way conversation is going to be impossible.
I suppose to turn the question around; if scientists announced tomorrow that they had recieved a transmission of intelligent extraterrestrial origin, what would you be hoping that you would be able to learn from it?
It’s too late to keep quiet so they don’t notice us, we may as well send something interesting.
Assuming TV signals do make it without being swamped by background noise, I would think that they would look artificial; especially if the image happened to be the TV test card; it repeats consistently. (I’m not suggesting that an alien civilisation would immediately recognise it as portraying an image, if indeed the idea of a rectangular 2D image was something that would occur to them at all)
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