I for one hope we don't send them the latest anti-virus software updates or a morse code translation guide
Posted on 12/18/2007 2:29:34 PM PST by blam
ET too bored by Earth transmissions to respond
16:35 18 December 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite
Messages sent into space directed at extraterrestrials may have been too boring to earn a reply, say two astrophysicists trying to improve on their previous alien chat lines.
Humans have so far sent four messages into space intended for alien listeners. But they have largely been made up of mathematically coded descriptions of some physics and chemistry, with some basic biology and descriptions of humans thrown in.
Those topics will not prove gripping reading to other civilisations, says Canadian astrophysicist Yvan Dutil. If a civilisation is advanced enough to understand the message, they will already know most of its contents, he says: "After reading it, they will be none the wiser about us humans and our achievements. In some ways, we may have been wasting our telescope time."
In 1999 and 2003, Dutil and fellow researcher Stephane Dumas beamed messages in a language of their own design into space. Now, they are working to compose more interesting messages.
"The question is, what is interesting to an extraterrestrial?" Dutil told New Scientist. "We think the answer is using some common ground to communicate things about humanity that will be new or different to them – like social features of our society." Fortunately those subjects are already being described mathematically by economists, physicists and sociologists, he adds.
Vexing problems
One topic the two researchers are already composing messages about is the so-called 'cake cutting problem'. "How do you share out resources is a classical problem for all civilisations," he says.
Democracy is also a potentially eye- or antenna- catching subject. "The maths shows that with more than two choices,
(Excerpt) Read more at space.newscientist.com ...
Boobs. Girls got them. Guys like them.
'Course, if we want them to stay away, a few pics of Helen Thomas or the Hilinator would do....
Too true! If insects on Mars were trying to communicate with us on 2.5MHz AM HF frequencies, then we on spread spectrum 2.4GHz WiFi internet would totally miss it, miss it on cell phones, miss it on DishTV (and NFL Network..)
Only some little old lady with an old tube Heathkit would hear anything, and then go back to sleep.
I could not agree more. War is disgusting and I saw it first hand in Iraq with mass graves etc. etc. etc. Thank God for President Bush. I really think our distant cousins are keeping their distance from us because we are not civilized according to their standards. I know they are there because I had hands on experience with the Roswell debris. It was not ours!!
We have heard nothing. It is possible that we are the first to reach this level. It is possible that we are the only ones out there.
Especially if only random chance put us together.
Uummm, Heathkit never made kits that could receive anything near that frequency range. AND little old ladies probably couldn’t find rosin core solder or even a pencil tip iron for assembly. meh.
I for one hope we don't send them the latest anti-virus software updates or a morse code translation guide
In the book “Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence” (Sagan editor — CETI was the old acronym) Thomas J Gold (”Deep Life”, “Power from the Earth”) said “But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize.” (see also p 210)
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