Posted on 12/02/2011 12:53:10 PM PST by Daffynition
Somewhere in the cosmos, 36 light years away from us in the direction of the Hercules constellation, a series of electromagnetic waves stretching across 30 million miles of space carries a message from Earth. Each of the 1,679 signals it contains falls in one of two frequencies – an FM signal that translates to a bunch of ones and zeroes.
This message originated in 1974, when it was broadcast from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to commemorate the facility's renovation. The authors of the message, Carl Sagan and SETI founder Frank Drake, hoped that any aliens who happened to receive it might notice that 1,679 is the product of two prime numbers, 23 and 73, and if you arrange all the zeroes and ones in a grid of 23 columns and 73 rows, you get a series of simple, ASCII-like pictures, including a double helix and a crude image of a person. Whether or not an alien civilization could crack the code, they would at least notice something funny about these FM signals. They're 10 million times stronger than the background noise from our sun.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Somewhere along the way those radio transmissions have scattered to the point of not being able to noticed I am sure.And if the receivers are like incredibly gossamer-thin spider-webs stretching over thousands of light-years, operating by a civilization 100,000 years old?
I bet they're watching the first episodes of Howdy Doody right about now.
My last post could easily be taken out of context, I was referring to AM radio.
North Korea is very green - /goreSad, sick and true.
Gore burns more electricity in his servants quarters than the entire country of North Korea.
How long will it take for them to discern that Howdy Doody is a puppet and not a master race or something?
That’s all we need...an Occupy Earth movement.
Based on what happened on Earth, to evolve advanced intelligence faster than asteroids reset life probably requires a war making disposition. We killed off all our serious competition, so a second rule is only one advanced intelligence life form survives in a domain, such as one Earth or one galaxy. If we are not alone the odds are humans will be killed off as as competitive nuisance. We should keep quiet. This is the best guess based on what we know about the millions of life forms that had their day on Earth.
LOL! I was thinking about Larry King’s old late-night AM radio show, but whatever!
Seriously, I vaguely remembering reading Carl Sagan’s book “Contact” when I was in college. In it he discusses how early TV signals were the first radio transmissions to escape the earth.
I also think he might have touched on it in his public broadcasting series “Cosmos”.
vast distances will erode the signal and break it up. I don’t think anyone who is several light years away can get to watch anything.
guess who is dinner?
When they finally get to see I Love Lucy, then they will start to think that Howdy Doody is the master race.
I think you’re drawing the opposite of the logical conclusion.
Based on what we’ve seen of humans, as a violent civilization becomes more advanced, a progressively smaller number of hyper-violent individuals are able to do progressively more damage.
It would take a medieval army days to do the amount of damage a WWII bomber wing could do in 5 minutes.
All of the people in history couldn’t have done the amount of damage a few thousand would have done, had we had a nuclear war in the 60s.
50 or 60 years from now - or sooner - a small lab of determined scientists - perhaps a dozen people or less - will be able to tailor make a possibly unstoppable virus and release it on the world - imagine if the Nazis had possessed a complete understanding of the human genome.
Every advance of a violent civilization increases its chances of meeting a violent end.
I could be wrong but, it makes perfect sense to me. Much more than the opposite, anyway.
They may want our water, which we cant seem to find anywhere yet...
Let’s build a beacon to tell aliens who we were
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sad. When I saw this thread’s title I thought the poster was talking about illegals and their lack of knowledge about this country and its heritage.
There is also the possibility that they must come here because they destroyed everything where they were. Kind of like liberals fleeing the cities.
Better yet let’s not contact the aliens at all. They might think we taste like chicken.
I don’t think that we can depend on aggressiveness culling itself out. As long as aggression can be kept outward and not inward it can survive and controlled aggression is a survival trait.
For example lets imagine a species with an extremely xenophobic nature. They can be perfectly passive and cooperative with what they see as part of themselves but utterly ruthless to something unlike themselves.
Or what if a intelligent, highly developed, but passive species were to interact with a less developed but aggressive species? Imagine western liberals dealing with Muslim extremists if you will. Before the passive species knew what was happening, the aggressive species could be destroy them with their own technology and outrun their own destructive tendencies enough to find other victim species to exercise their aggressiveness.
Personally I think it is pretty well us, the angels and the demons, but I’m prepared to be wrong. In any case, if there is anything that might hear us we should probably not be shouting out location because the response is probably more dangerous than we can imagine.
Until we know better about what is out there, we should keep our heads down, mouths shut, listen and learn. Remember the old saw: “We learn more by listening than talking.”
Comets.
And any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel is probably going to have figured out how to do things like combine hydrogen and oxygen.
“Each of the 1,679 signals it contains falls in one of two frequencies”
It’s gonna suck if the aliens receivers are tuned to the wrong frequency...
Should have used ‘spread spectrum’..
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