I’m baffled on this one. I still think we are missing the point of the OP. When we send a signal how are they going to know how to interpret it? They get a bunch of radio noises, then what? Maybe they are able to extrapolate a binary signal from it. Then would could send numbers so that they see we are counting. The next step is the difficult one. But how do you send the word “one”? They aren’t going to have an ASCII table to match up values.
I don’t know of a good way for us to send a decipher a message without any common reference points. Some people have talked about a periodic table. How do you send a periodic table to them? It would seem to me that faceless communication would be nearly impossible.
I can’t see how they could not get a binary signal from it. The signal is either being sent or it’s not. If they can’t understand presence/absence then we really do have absolutely nothing in common mentally and not only is communication right out but I doubt we’d even recognise them as being alive, let alone intelligent (or them us). Even bacteria recognise presence/absence data.
We can send it however we like and they can translate it however they like. The actual symbols attached to a mathematical constant are irrelevant to the functioning of a constant. We can represent pi as “pi”, or as 3.1415927…, or the funnny little Greek letter that I haven’t figured out how to code for yet, or as “guijdeghtrb”. It’s irrelevant so long as we know what it represents. Similarly if they wish to represent the word ‘one’ with the letters “f-i-f-t-e-e-n” it doesn’t matter so long as they understand that *=fifteen, and that **=three hundred and sixty five. Since we sent our resprentation of the word one as the binary information 0110011100010, they can represent it however they like, but when they send it back they will automatically recode it as 0110011100010, which both we and they know is equivalent to *. Essentially they can build there own decoder that will be mathematically correct if liguistically inaccurate. If you thought it necessary then eventually we will have sufficient shared language to enabvle us to transmit the details on how to make a true ascii decoder so they can see how we represent those figures in English. Then we can transmit the plans for a voice simulator so they can hear how we transmit vibrations in our atmosphere. None of that is necessary of course.
Mathematics itself is the common refernce point. So long as ‘* + ** = ***’ then we can represent *, ** and ** however we like in longhand.
Relatively simply. Once they have deciphered our numbers and we have an agreed upon representaion for line and column breaks then tranmistting a periodic table is simple. It’s just a collection of lines and columns within lines and columns after all. The pattern of a periodic table and electron configurations would be obvious no matter how it was actually drawn to anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry. Given that we know it’s going to be something both important and universal, a bit of study will rapidly reveal its nature.
There’s something in the Feynman lectures on this. In fact, he talks about this very situation (communicating with an anti-material alien). I believe his solution somehow relates to the Hall Effect, which has to do with charge carriers being deflected in a semiconductor. Of course, I guess you’d have to communicate all the other concepts first to figure it out, but I think it could be done.
This discussion seems to hint of the “Mathematics - Invented or Discovered?” debate, which has come up on this board before.
I’m going to disregard the most likely scenario of detecting a possibly intelligent signal source, sending one of our own, and waiting years (and years?) for a reply. That’s not communication so much as phone tag. It’s much more fun to speculate about a more gratifying, conversational form of communication, that’s two-way and more immediate.
In that case, I’m wondering if the question isn’t best understood the other way around: how would the aliens communicate with us? Because we’re not picking up any distant signals yet(not that we civvies know of, anyway), and we’re, figuratively speaking, light years away from sending manned missions beyond the solar system.
So any Hollywood movie-ish communication would have to involve their detecting our signals, rather than the other way around, and then doing the legwork to come visit us. Their ability to detect us by our radio/TV/telecommunications activities from such a distance, as weak as those signals would be, suggests a significant tech edge, or a greater “SETI” effort on their part, or both.
And [un?]fortunately for us humans, we’ve become indiscriminate and prolific emitters of all sorts of electronic transmissions.
And if they could pick up some of those signals, they’d be able to learn plenty about us, down to our Kmart “blue-light” specials.
Of course, they may well decide the trip wouldn’t be worth it.
Gaspode, I read that short story too, many years ago, and it’s always stuck with me because it seems so obvious once you think of it.
As I recall, it’s quite an old story, since the setting is on Mars, against the classic sci-fi background of a Martian civilization that died out when the water disappeared, yada yada, but aside from that, it was a good story.
Another good one is Murmurs of Earth, also by Sagan. It goes in depth into the hows, whys, and “what do they mean?”'s of the Pioneer plaques, Voyager records, and the Aricebo message. I think it’s out of print, but it would probably be in your local library.
It’s even possible that an alien civilization only slightly more advanced than ours would have had telescopes sensitive enough to map planets around nearby stars. If so, then they’d have their eyes and ears on Earth, because they would know that it could harbor life. We’d be on the galactic watch list. And now our signals are on the way, and as they start intersecting other star systems the odds of one of them being at at least that level of technology grows. Maybe one day…
Actually, it turns out that it is possible to communicate the difference between right and left–it’s just very difficult. In some weak force interactions–particularly involving, I believe, the K meson–there is a difference of perhaps one part in a thousand between right and left. I leave it to someone with more knowledge of physics to come along and explain the details. Or, you can search the board for “Kaon,” as there was a thread dealing with this very subject not a week ago.
Personally, I’d rather just leave it at that. This was actually a homework problem in my Particle Physics class last semester (How would you tell an alien that our hearts are on the left side?), and it took me half a page to say it, without even having to explain the terminology.