7 ms·
No, I'm not forgetting fictional cases in which the point was to transmit to an unknown civilization. I'm talking about the real way that real civilizations are
by jerf 1y ago
No, I'm not forgetting fictional cases in which the point was to transmit to an unknown civilization. I'm talking about the real way that real civilizations are going to transmit data to each other, without meaning for it to be picked up randomly, on the assumption that while aliens may or may not have human-comprehensible motivations we can generally operate on the assumption that they will not be stupid and wasteful in the pursuit of their goals.
This isn't quite why I wrote this, but it's close enough: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/alien_communication/ https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/alien_communication/ If we're going to argue in the form of fiction.
- dylan604 1y agoWe sent a gold plate with a bunch of data on it hurling through space on the off chance that a) it is ever found, b) it is found be intelligent beings, c) would figure out the little puzzles. In this case, the beacon would be the satellite itself even if its power has long since died and no longer emits any RF energy. It's not actually sci-fi. They sent a message with Arecibo that was also encoded if not within a beacon signal. Just because it was a scifi plot does not mean its not something that could be done to good use. If humans wanted, we could send a similar beacon signal even if it's not pulses of all the primes between 1-101 with the same data from the gold plate. At one point, flying like a bird was scifi. Traveling to the moon was scifi. Having a computer that fit in the palm of your hand was scifi. There's a lot of actual science that has been inspired from a scifi idea.