(no subject)

[unbibium]

There's been a lot of links from Memepool to the Arecibo Message, which was a message that was beamed into space from a radio telescope in 1974, for about three minutes.

Now, anyone who knows anything about SETI knows that a single message with practically no redundancy being sent out for three minutes has no chance of being received, so nobody really cared whether the message was really worth sending.

Suppose someone out there receives and decodes the whole message. Perhaps some chemists would be really excited to learn about DNA. But everyone else will be pissed off that that's all we chose to tell them. They'll know they're not alone in the universe, and maybe some alien movie producer will make the alien equivalent of "Species", but that's it.

The link to anticryptography implies that maybe we could send more interesting things, by sending them computer programs and then compressing all our messages. That is, of course, assuming that they have computers that can run these programs, or even realize that the instructions they're writing down are intended for computers, and not warehouses full of math slaves.

The programs described by the computer are simple mathematical models describing gravity, but if we're going to go through the trouble of beaming a message out over many light years, I'd like to think we'd have something better to say than "WE KNOW ABOUT GRAVITY! w00t!"

The question I'm wondering about is, suppose we wanted to send them something cultural, such as the works of Shakespeare? Is such a thing even possible? Or are we forever doomed to be limited to this egghead stuff?

Suppose we find a planet close enough to exchange a dialogue, even if the dialogue spans decades. We exchange physics, then we exchange biology, then we exchange little facts about various human lifestyles. Then we exchange history. That seems to make more sense, and be more fun for the public.

Then we send them the most popular religious texts and a description of their origins and the places in the world in which people follow them, and to what percentage. And suppose they respond back telling us they're all full of shit. There will certainly be people on the Earth who want to declare war on them, but won't be able to, no matter how hard they try, because of that whole speed-of-light thing. Religious organizations everywhere will pool their resources to try and disrupt, or stop, interspecies communication. Some churches may even declare it sinful, or claim the messages are being beamed directly from Satan. Scary shit.

Too many tangents to go off on here, but you know what I want to see the most? Alien cartoons. Bet they're wild.

Comments

Alien Cartoons

[miwasatoshi.livejournal.com]

But since most Americans think Japanese are, in fact, aliens, anime should be considered a good substitute in the interim.

Actually

[lautreamontg.livejournal.com]

Following the sociological formula, a socio-religio group that encounters a foreign socio-religio group of equal or greater "power" (all things considered), the main impetus is to convert rather than destroy, as what happened in Japan, China and India, as opposed to say Native American faiths or Judaism. Familiarity with another socio-religio group is much more likely to cause conflict, as with Christianity and Islam and Islam and Hinduism.

Re: Actually

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Perhaps. But, unless the Earth religions control the broadcasts, they will have no way to communicate directly with the aliens and suggest conversion. And, if the speed of light holds up, they won't be able to meet the aliens in person.

So their obstacle will be the radio telescopes themselves.