8 ms·
Arecibo message
- saagarjha 8y ago> The number 1,679 was chosen because it is a semiprime (the product of two prime numbers), to be arranged rectangularly as 73 rows by 23 columns. Why not pick the square of a prime number, so that it can't be arranged to wrong way?
- V-2 8y agoPerhaps the clear difference in entropy between 23x73 and 73x23 renderings actually stresses the fact that the data conveys a thoughtfully arranged message of some sort.
- saagarjha 8y agoIMO the choice of a nondiscrete semiprime data length is a pretty good indicator that it isn't random either…
- scj 8y agoIs the first column of 111000111 "111" or "101"?
- saagarjha 8y agoDoes it matter? Why should we assume that whoever receives our message prefers reading it from left-to-right rather than top-to-bottom?
- lerie82 8y agoi guess someone was re-watching x-files and decided to share something that happened 45 years ago and now its on the front page of yc
- giuseony 8y agoSo?
- cfadvan 8y agoI can’t be the only person who thinks that broadcasting with the intent of advertising our presence is at best, pointless, and at worse dangerous, right? Passive SETI is great, if unlikely to succeed, but this just seems like a bad idea.
- jedimastert 8y agoThis is actually a really big debate within the scientific community.
- V-2 8y agoI guess we're broadcasting it inadvertently anyway, with all the radio noise we create.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoMost broadcasts quickly attenuate into noise.
- Diederich 8y agoThat's the trick, right? In the year I was born, the signals that my mobile phone creates and decodes were impossible to separate from noise. It's very hard to say how sensitive listeners might become given enough time for technological development.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoA lot of that is fancy algorithms and not much distance compared to telling an encoded, attenuated interstellar broadcast apart from the background radiation.
- f_allwein 8y agoThere is also WETI, which might be the better approach: http://weti-institute.org http://weti-institute.org
- 8y ago
- Rooster61 8y agoSomething that always bothered me about this transmission is the fact that the numbers at the top are said to represent 1-10 in binary format. However, when I look at this, when you get to the 8th digit, it shoves the next block out to the side, representing an overflow so that additional numbers can be represented. Is this not representative of the very definition of how to express numbers in a different base? This isn't binary, it's octal. When you rollover after the 7th digit, you have a new set of 8 characters that can represent a discreet unit. I sort of understand how they are passing this off as binary, but without reading an explanation of what this represents, my first instinct is to consider it octal.
- lisper 8y ago> This isn't binary, it's octal Potato, potahto.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoNot if you own a Heathkit H-8, it isn't. (Possibly the only computer made ...note that qualifier, please ... that required most users to learn a number base in order to operate it.)
- LoSboccacc 8y agoyeah it's weird, first they encode numbers one to ten, then the information is in binary, then is pictographic, there's no key to split the sections by encoding, and the key at the beginning is not used.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoDon't get too hung up on notation of numbers. It is just notation after all. If you group binary digits into fours is it octal? When we group decimal digits into threes are we really using base 1000?
- err4nt 8y agoI created an animation of the Arecibo message in less than 1kb of Javascript: https://js1k.com/2017-magic/demo/2843 https://js1k.com/2017-magic/demo/2843 Here's a video of the animation playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMzwmdaloXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMzwmdaloXc It was a lot of fun to put together, and I know where was a lot of human thought put into the message, but after working with the data of this message for dozens (hundreds?) of hours finessing it and making it as small as possible, the longer I looked at it the less I believe any alien receiving it would be able to decode the meaning we communicated in it. I imagine it's evidence of terrestrial intelligence for aliens who might wonder if they're alone, but I'm not sure how well the intended meaning of the message itself will come through to a non-human being if it's not even obvious to a human being that already knows what it is.
- vinchuco 8y agoIt's a big problem not knowing the audience. [1] 47:00 https://youtu.be/_ZG8HBuDjgc?t=47m10s https://youtu.be/_ZG8HBuDjgc?t=47m10s
- pdfernhout 8y agoThe message looks a lot like Native American Wampum belts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum I can wonder how many of those Wampum belts which remain are still well understood? (Given the use of Wampum to store and transfer knowledge, the reason Native Americans were so eager to trade beaver pelts and such for small colorful beads from Europe was essentially equivalent to people today being willing to trade used empty Starbucks coffee cups for new Flash IC storage chips...)