OK, Say You're an Extraterrestrial ...

[Animorph]

That's my plan at this point. A nice high-res B&W movie, say 1024 by 1024 pixels.

It starts with an image of the probe, showing it next to a planet. The planet shows lights, suggesting a civilization. Then the image zooms out to show the rest of the galaxy, and zooms into other planets that have similar lights.

Next, back to an image of the probe and a planet, showing slow (light-speed) signals between the two. Then it zooms out again, and should faster signals.

But here's a question: Why do the pixel width and height have to be prime numbers? I know Sagan did that, but I'm not sure it's necessary. If the first frame is a square of rectangles along the outer borders, I think that might clue in the receiving civilization.

How would it help if the image were 1009 x 1009?

If it was something like 1024 x 1024 we would have to try lots of possible combinations to decode it. 512 x 2048, 256 x 4096, etc., though not too hard these days. The prime numbers allow only one solution. Still have to figure out which side is up though.

 

[freebird5825]

How did I know that a thread about extraterrestrials would include lots about a probe?

Skip forward to 2:17 in this clip

ID4 end air battle - YouTube

I couldn't find the diner scene where he talked about his alien abduction experience. It was a classic!

 

[Keim]

OK, I'll play along.

"I'm an Extraterrestrial".

Now: Call me a taxi.

Okay. You're a taxi. Feel better?

 

[yakers]

We had gathered on the second moon of Anzor, a challenging development. A new, the 11th, type of sentient species had been identified, they called themselves ‘humans’. We had to decide did we want to study them more or initiate direct contact. An unusual species, so far they had remarkable achievements both positive and negative. Their technology had led them to the lowest level of interstellar species but we know from observing them and from our own species experience that they may have a discontinuous development and we needed to be prepared to initiate contact or deal with their eventual emergence.

Initially we would monitor them, XST (X-space/time) which would provide a virtually impossible barrier for them to grasp until they eventually did……

 

[heeyy_joe]

Okay. You're a taxi. Feel better?

:

 

[dallas27]

Otherways to make contact.... Holographic portray the aliens on the planet surface, would be immediate culture shock. Also, telepathy of course.

Then there are always crop circles.

I alway thought projecting a movie onto the stratosphere would be cool. Aurora-like.


Sent from my iPhone using Early Retirement Forum

 

[ls99]

'been accused of being extraterrestial on and off sice around age ten. This in spite of lacking a cone head..

No need for all the fancy technical stuff. Thought transfer is instanenous. Twins often have it. Not sure other civilaztions have the same herding instinct as air breathing earthlings, or have any interest in what could be considered a miserably failed social experiment of earthlings..

At one time during a discussion of aliens visiting earth, Edwart Teller supposed said: we are already here.

 

[TromboneAl]

If it's a square frame, the prime number of pixels reinforces that it MUST be a square because a 1009 x 1009 frame of 1,018,081 pixels cannot be divided any other way, but even if it were simply 1000 x 1000 the resulting 1,000,000 pixels are easy to see as a square and the most likely choice, even if other possibilities (500 x 2000) do exist.

Ah, good, that explains it, thanks.

 

[TromboneAl]

There have been a number of SF stories that used contact with an interstellar communications network as a significant element. Here are a few of the better known ones.

The Ophiuchi Hotline, John Varley (1977)
One plot element involves a 'contact' mechanism that uses a sort of observation post, and a laser communications line which just misses the inner solar system, so space travel by the locals is required to receive the messages.

Router, Charles Stross, Asimov's Science Fiction (Sept 2002), also as Accelerando, Chapter 5 (2005)
An automated system has installed a local router with faster-than-light connectivity elsewhere. Humanity eventually notices the router and contacts it. Hilarity ensues, including a 419 scam from outer space.

Singularity Sky, Charles Stross, 2003
An automated system designed to open (or re-open) communications with civilizations enters a solar system. Since communications implies exchange of information, potentially profitable, a variety of other commerce-oriented systems, researchers of a sort, and other hangers-on follow in the immediate wake of the telephone repairman to take advantage of new opportunities. Hilarity, and an economic singularity, ensues...

Contact, Carl Sagan (1985)
A message from a star system 25 light years away is received. The message includes a basic communications primer, and ends with plans to construct a very large machine.

Thanks, I'll take a look at those. I've read Contact before and am reading it again right now.

This free PDF book is interesting. It talks about an analogy for understanding signals from an alien civilization: The decryption of dead languages for which we have no information.

It also mentions the Voynich Manuscript, which has never been deciphered.

You can check out some other books I'm reading on this topic here.

 

[sengsational]

I like the way most SF shows with alians just ignore the whole language thing...they just make everyone speak english (i.e. Star Trek). Except for Darmok, which I thought was a cool episode. But presuming the alians speak english might not be too far from reality since we are not that far from a "universal translator" right now, you have got to expect that a civilization that figured out FTL transmissions will also just be able to tune into our radio and TV and in five minutes, have languages broadcast there figured out. Sort of like what I can do when I encounter a wifi signal "encrypted" with WEP.

 

[Totoro]

you have got to expect that a civilization that figured out FTL transmissions will also just be able to tune into our radio and TV and in five minutes, have languages broadcast there figured out.

Given that we still cannot talk to whales and dolphins in a meaningful way and barely understand dogs, horses to train them, I think that's wildly optimistic

 

[TromboneAl]

So think about how you want the FTL communication setup. What rules does it adhere to? Or do you want to sidestep the issue and not explain it?

Yes, sidestep it. That puts me somewhere between everything obeys all the laws we know, and REWahoo's "It's science FICTION."

Perhaps I'm being human-centric, but I'd expect that most civilizations of our level, when getting successive 1009 bursts of 1009 bytes (that is 8072 bits) of data would figure out that this might be a bitmap.

In any case, if something like that happens in my book, I think the readers will accept it.

Here's a mockup of a 1009x1009, 8 bits per pixel image:

In reading Contact again, I've concluded that the alien message transmission scheme was much more complicated than necessary just so the suspense of figuring it out could be drawn out.

 

[M Paquette]

Yes, sidestep it. That puts me somewhere between everything obeys all the laws we know, and REWahoo's "It's science FICTION."

That's your best bet. We don't know how, or if such a thing would work, and if it's not important to your characters or world building, trying to explain it away runs the risk of leaving a lump of exposition that gets invalidated next year, or worse, breaks up your story with an indigestible lump of StarTrekese.

In reading Contact again, I've concluded that the alien message transmission scheme was much more complicated than necessary just so the suspense of figuring it out could be drawn out.

You've got it. Sagan's world-building was in service to the larger story, and he used it to pace the middle stretch of the story. It also served to hint at the complexity and multiple layers that his aliens thought in.




Sent from my iPad using Early Retirement Forum

 

[growing_older]

Here's a mockup of a 1009x1009, 8 bits per pixel image

The 8 bits per pixel is a bit of a wildcard here. YOU know 8 bits per pixel and know now to decode them, but the fact that it's eight bits and not half as many 16 bits or twice as many 4 bit pixels is not obvious from the raw data. Likewise, are your 8 bits directly encoding a gray level? If so, which bit is most significant? Or are they some kind of lookup table for color information and more total levels of light/dark/color crammed into groupings. Not to mention more exotic encodings like a few bits for brightness and different bits for hue. All these (and many more) have actually been used in various human systems. It's not necessarily obvious what system we are using, let alone what aliens might think of ours, or try to send us.

A square frame of simply black and white (on/off) pixels might make a logical step as a primer to bridge to whatever n-bit color or greyscale you want to use for more nuanced communication.

 

[TromboneAl]

The 8 bits per pixel is a bit of a wildcard here. YOU know 8 bits per pixel and know now to decode them, but the fact that it's eight bits and not half as many 16 bits or twice as many 4 bit pixels is not obvious from the raw data. Likewise, are your 8 bits directly encoding a gray level? If so, which bit is most significant? Or are they some kind of lookup table for color information and more total levels of light/dark/color crammed into groupings. Not to mention more exotic encodings like a few bits for brightness and different bits for hue. All these (and many more) have actually been used in various human systems. It's not necessarily obvious what system we are using, let alone what aliens might think of ours, or try to send us.

A square frame of simply black and white (on/off) pixels might make a logical step as a primer to bridge to whatever n-bit color or greyscale you want to use for more nuanced communication.

Yes, I agree. My assumption is that the sending party assumes that the receiver will think "Hey this may be an image," and experiment with the different combinations of bits per pixel, LSB, MSB, color, gray level, etc. As soon as the right combination is hit, the receiver will know immediately.

Here's the current scheme:

1. A burst of 1,018,081 bits of data, a brief pause
2. A burst of 1,018,081 bits of data, a brief pause
3. This continues for a total of 1009 repetitions

The bits in the first and last bursts are all 1s.
All the intervening bursts start with 11111111 and end with 11111111, with all zeroes in between.

​

That might get the receiver into the right frame of mind.

Also, after that first black with white frame image is sent the next image could look like this, since the probe could take a photo of earth, and use it as part of the movie:

 

[ERD50]

The 8 bits per pixel is a bit of a wildcard here. ...

Agreed. 8-bits flies in the face of the explanation of using a prime number for the frame. I saw T-Al's explanation, but I would still think a straight binary B/W w/o gray-scale would make more sense in this case. Just use a higher prime to get more detail. A B/W laser printer can make decent pictures.

I'm probably going way too far here, but I also wonder if some very different civilization would 'see' a picture in the same way we do? Seems to me a 2D representation of our world has to be processed by our brains to turn it into a representation of the real 3D thing. Maybe other civilizations don't respond to light like we do. Maybe they detect gravitational field shifts, or magnetic fields, or something we have no knowledge of. And maybe their intelligence doesn't extend to imagining how we 'see' things?

But I guess you need some basis for people to follow along. I just recall, when I was a kid, hearing scientists say that 'life' could not exist on such and such planet, due to the atmosphere or something. I couldn't help but think - why couldn't a different kind of 'life' form there, a kind of life that would find our planet fatal?

-ERD50

 

[MooreBonds]

I'm probably going way too far here, but I also wonder if some very different civilization would 'see' a picture in the same way we do? Seems to me a 2D representation of our world has to be processed by our brains to turn it into a representation of the real 3D thing. Maybe other civilizations don't respond to light like we do. Maybe they detect gravitational field shifts, or magnetic fields, or something we have no knowledge of. And maybe their intelligence doesn't extend to imagining how we 'see' things?

But I guess you need some basis for people to follow along. I just recall, when I was a kid, hearing scientists say that 'life' could not exist on such and such planet, due to the atmosphere or something. I couldn't help but think - why couldn't a different kind of 'life' form there, a kind of life that would find our planet fatal?

-ERD50

I am not an astronomer, but I'm willing to bet that nearly all planetary systems that have been observed exist with a fusion-fueled star at the center, with orbiting bodies around the perimeter.

And with the exception of a black hole at the center of a solar system instead of a star (which may have been a star at one time), all solar systems will have a star that is throwing off a lot of energy in the visible light section of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Regarding temperature, life would not be able to form unless there is a liquid medium mixing things around. Having just a solid/frozen planet would not allow enough things to mix and move and disperse around to actually cause things to react and interact. If you relied on moving gases to blow things around, it would be far more slowly because of buoyancy factors when things are in liquids vs gases. And while there are things like plate tectonics and a planet's own friction-induced heat radiating from its core that could provide some heat, a lifeform would more likely than not be utilizing the electromagnetic radiation from the star (since molten metals in the planet's core would likely be way too hot for compounds to form, which leaves a very small thickness of mantle/crust for compounds to collect and form to create life - and see previous statement about interactions between solids vs suspended in liquid for the difficulties in life forming with solid matter sitting next to other solid matter).

And since many compounds have melting and boiling points somewhat in a similar range of, say, 0 degrees F to, say, 350 degrees F, the odds of having a lifeform based on a planet with predominantly liquid helium or liquid hydrogen (with very low boiling point temperatures) is not as likely, since everything else at the extreme low temperature of liquified elements that are in gas form on Earth, would be frozen solid and unable to move on the other planets. So that implies that the temperatures of the other planets would likely be somewhat similar to earth's temperatures (note: all of the above are "likely" factors, not absolutes. Could alien lifeforms develop on a planet like Jupiter? Perhaps...but given these factors above, I would bet it would be far more likely with conditions similar to found on a planet like ours)

So from the above view, it is reasonable to expect that if there is alien lifeforms, odds are it would likely have some form of similar environmental conditions to Earth (in terms of light-sensing and temperatures), rather than vastly different. Again, it doesn't mean it's impossible - just appears to be more likely.

 

[Animorph]

There are probably some framing things you could do on the 8 bit bytes as well. Perhaps in a way that would give you a nice grid when everything is assembled properly, which could then be discarded. Simple spaces every ninth bit would probably give it away simply enough. I wouldn't count on someone trying all combos of bits and figuring out the 8 bits and what to do with them.

With a single bit per pixel, you could do something that would describe the more complex format and then switch to it for subsequent communications.

 

[ERD50]

Why not a 3D representation? A prime # of elements in 3 dimensions. In some ways, that seems simpler than trying to represent a 3D image in 2D, which always has some distortions. We are somewhat artificially limited to 2D when drawing a 3D object on a piece of paper, or projecting it on a monitor, but those limitations don't exist in a transmission of information.

It's the difference between sending someone a picture of an object, versus sending someone a 3D model of that object. The 3D carries so much more info, and I'm sure intelligent beings could figure this out, and I'm sure they would have 3D display technology.

-ERD50

 

[TromboneAl]

>why couldn't a different kind of 'life' form there, a kind of life that would find our planet fatal?

Yes, I always thought the same thing, and, for example, silicon-based lifeforms were in vogue for a while (not the LA silicone-based lifeforms).

But I've come to understand that there are constraints, and it's unlikely that complex lifeforms could be very different from us in their molecular basis. That is, it pretty much has to be carbon-based.

True, I'm assuming that the aliens are visual, and would understand a 2D image. I think those are good assumptions. Note that vision has evolved independently at least twice on this planet alone (cephalopods). I seem to remember experiments in which octopi responded to 2D images.

3D is more messy, and I'm not sure it adds much.

>With a single bit per pixel, you could do something that would describe the more complex format and then switch to it for subsequent communications.

I considered that, but I think that it should be trivial to figure out the BPP etc with the 8 BPP image. As soon as you get it, the frame will pop out.

BTW, I made a stupid mistake above, I should have written:

1. A burst of 8,072 bits of data, a brief pause
2. A burst of 8,072 bits of data, a brief pause
3. This continues for a total of 1009 repetitions

 

[TromboneAl]

I just finished the book The Eerie Silence. Here's my review on GoodReads:

I read this book partly for research for a sci fi book I'm writing, but also to understand why SETI has been so unsuccessful.

He showed me why. Namely, 1. Concerning civilizations that detect our broadcasts, then send us a message, the timing doesn't work. For example, if the civilization is 100 light-years away, they would just be detecting our signals about now, and it would be another 100 years before we would get their signals. 2. Concerning our detecting incidental signals from other civilizations, they are just too weak for us. Also, judging from our brief transmission period (as we move towards cable), we'd have to be lucky to detect them at the right time, and 3. Concerning "tutorial beacons" they just take too much energy.

He says we need to figure out new ways to search--the radio telescope thing isn't working.

Surprisingly, his conclusion is that we are probably the only intelligent life in the observable universe. I read that several times to be sure I understood, and indeed, that's what he says.​

 

[yakers]

You could switch from science fiction toward science fantasy, really get rid of space/time, you shift consciousness and be wherever whenever you want. Not too hard since time and space are illusions/social conventions/scientific mental creations. What if we find the alien is already communicating with us internally?

 

[Walt34]

What if we find the alien is already communicating with us internally?

Oh, so THAT'S where those voices in my head are coming from!

 

[growing_older]

But I've come to understand that there are constraints, and it's unlikely that complex lifeforms could be very different from us in their molecular basis. That is, it pretty much has to be carbon-based.

Even if you want to stick with carbon based life instead of other (theoretically possible) compositions, there are still lots of ways that Earth based carbon life evolved that could have gone differently elsewhere. One significant possibility is stereo-chemistry of proteins. Many protein building blocks are possible to construct as mirror images of each other, the so called right-handed or left-handed proteins. Curiously, all Earth life uses the left-handed proteins and discards the right-handed ones. Some right handed proteins are dangerous (rare) or otherwise mess up left-handed life forms but it isn't hard to imagine a carbon based chemistry that is right-handed (or ambidextrous) that reacts badly to some common Earth protein, and likely conflict and drama would follow.

 

[TromboneAl]

Even if you want to stick with carbon based life instead of other (theoretically possible) compositions, there are still lots of ways that Earth based carbon life evolved that could have gone differently elsewhere. One significant possibility is stereo-chemistry of proteins. Many protein building blocks are possible to construct as mirror images of each other, the so called right-handed or left-handed proteins. Curiously, all Earth life uses the left-handed proteins and discards the right-handed ones. Some right handed proteins are dangerous (rare) or otherwise mess up left-handed life forms but it isn't hard to imagine a carbon based chemistry that is right-handed (or ambidextrous) that reacts badly to some common Earth protein, and likely conflict and drama would follow.

This speaker talks about that, but in a different and interesting context, in this talk. I watched it this morning and enjoyed it a lot:

Paul Davies - The eerie silence: Are we alone in the Universe? - YouTube