
The Best Way yet to Talk to Aliens, If They’re out There (2013) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/the-best-way-yet-to-talk-to-aliens-if-theyre-out-there
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grandalf
Wouldn't it make sense to communicate minimal intelligence and willingness to
communicate in the most robust possible way, such as:

\- simultaneously transmit on a lot of frequencies from LF through light

\- modulate a minimal "intelligent" message in a wide variety of ways
(frequency, amplitude, pulse, phase, polarization, etc.) and also unmodulated
(simple carrier).

\- assume widely different time scales, so the message should be sent so that
it takes 1 second, one minute, one hour, and one day

\- alternate sending/receiving on the same lock-step

The goal is to get another intelligent life form to realize we are intelligent
and trying to communicate, but there appear to be tons of assumptions baked
into the approach used in the article.

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TrainedMonkey
Here is something I came up with last time thread like this was around:

While writing this I though of algorithm that might work better to maximize
amount of civilizations you reach. This would require a relatively stable
space transmitter, or series of coordinated ground transmitters:

1\. Pick a set of stars S that potentially can support advanced civilization
and are located closely in a region of space (so you do not have to reposition
telescope a lot).

2\. Start sending signals primer signals to stars. For signal S[x], temporal
difference between S[x] and S[x+1] would a set amount shorter than temporal
distance between S[x-1] and S[x]. Primer signals are short and cheap,
transmitting entire Wikipedia should take way longer (Weeks, months, maybe
years?).

3\. Once time between primer signals reaches some threshold start transmitting
data set.

Idea is that this will give advanced civilization potentially listening a
chance to prepare to receive full transmission, while avoiding costly repeats
of big data set.

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tjradcliffe
To get a sense of available band-width, old-style TV was 512 x 480 interlaced,
so 30 full frames per second, three colours, with about 6 bit resolution per
colour, or about 0.5 MB/s. Wikipedia is about 23 GB (text only, including
markup). So about 12 hours to transmit the whole thing. Much larger with
images, of course.

[I did the calculation this way because back in about 1990 I had the brilliant
idea of a satellite that broadcast the sum total of human knowledge to
everyone on Earth, and figured out that a single TV channel could basically
handle it on a 24 hour cycle, based on what we knew then. Which just goes to
show how stupid brilliant ideas can look a short time later...]

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peatmoss
Obligatory XKCD about communicating with aliens:
[http://xkcd.com/1377/](http://xkcd.com/1377/)

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kyberias
This is such an old article that the service (Lone Signal) linked in the text
is no longer operational.

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tom_scrace
I found a slightly more comprehensible translation of that Vedic quote:

    
    
        Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
        He from whom all this great creation came.
        Whether his will created or was mute,
        The Most High seer that is in highest heaven,
        He knows it - or perchance even He knows not.[1]
    

[1] [http://www.creationmyths.org/rigveda-10-129-indian-
creation/](http://www.creationmyths.org/rigveda-10-129-indian-creation/)

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chriswarbo
CosmicOS is a nice idea for what to put in a message:
[http://cosmicos.github.io/](http://cosmicos.github.io/)

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risk000
Its my opinion that they are out there, their communications with us have
already been very, very extensive. This guy is a good place to start
researching the phenomenon:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBbdJMl0H64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBbdJMl0H64)

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rbrogan
If there were aliens that understood the "hailing message" and did not
respond, and if we were to assume there was a message that would get a
response, then how to figure that out? How to get better at sending messages
when getting no response?

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deciplex
Tell them we learned how to cheaply travel faster than light using this one
weird trick? That other interstellar civilizations _hate_ us?

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usermac
Makes me think of the Golden Record we sent I think in the 70's Reference:
[http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html](http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html)

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golemotron
> Through our website, users can send a 144-character text message for free

Twitter++

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andrewd18
More like Twitter++++.

