Posted on 01/27/2005 8:03:58 PM PST by KevinDavis
Will we ever find a primer for decoding messages from extraterrestrials? Last month, anthropologists who gathered for a major conference in Atlanta, Georgia heard some news that will be sobering for SETI enthusiasts: it may be much more difficult to understand extraterrestrials than many scientists have thought before.
Among the sessions held during December’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association was one called "Anthropology, Archaeology, and Interstellar Communication: Science and the Knowledge of Distant Worlds." The session included papers by scholars from such diverse fields as astronomy, archaeology, anthropology, and psychology. Is there a Cosmic Rosetta Stone, they asked, drawing parallels to Earth’s own Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics? Will we ever find a comparable primer for decrypting any messages we might receive some day from extraterrestrials?
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
"Hey, wait a minute! It's a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!"
Will they also work with demoncraps and their Orwellian "newspeak"? Lets start with words like "progressive". If one hangs onto a failed political system that has never worked since invented over 100 years ago, one is "progressive". If one is in favor or murdering unborn babies, depriving them of any chance at life, that is "pro-choice".
If one is in favor of world domination by people who will kill you because you don't share their religion, that is "peace".
(etc.)
Very interesting! I see that our top scholars have a lot of time on their hands. What other pressing issues can they address in these placid days here on Earth?
Lingo Pacifica?
Neither does you.
Baldar spoke French.
Try talking to military personnel who were on Nellis AFB, near target range #4, in the mid 1960's...
Curiously, it has turned out that developed societies do well to let and indeed encourage many of their best minds to engage in flights of fancy without any obvious application to real problems.
Facts and things which turn out to be useful but would not have been found by pursuing uses are often discovered in this way. All of the investigations which overthrew classical physics and led to both general relativity and quantum mechanics were quite divorced from application. The mathematics which went into GR and QM had all been done in advance by mathematicians who did it because it was pretty and interesting to them, not because it was useful. And without it, we wouldn't have atomic energy (and my wife's father would likely have been killed in the invasion of the Japanese home islands in WW II) or lasers (how many of us don't need glasses thanks to the surgical use of lasers?).
Figuring out how to reliably communicate with someone utterly alien, even if never needed for extraterrestrials, might be useful: suppose we notice that the really big neural network architecture computer built with some single quantum scale circuitry is doing things it wasn't programmed to do. . .
And some of us think Muslims are utterly alien.
Crunch data from radio telescopes on your PC or MAC with your spare CPU cycles.
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home
No it won't work with liberals since it requires meaning to function.
If English was good enough for Jesus it's good nuff for aliens.
The Rosetta Stone already exists.
Congressman Billybob
SETI is a huge waste of money. If we have head nothing so far odds are that we wont ever.
If there be other intelligent life akin to us, there is a comsic rosetta stone, yes.
And neither does you. (ba-da boom)
Don't aliens speak spanish?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.