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Sci-Fi Communications

A New Proposal For Interstellar Communication With Alien Intelligences (arxiv.org) 97

Posted by BeauHD from the worth-a-shot dept.
OneHundredAndTen writes: A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate. For example, for 1+1 = 2, the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1+1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1+1 = 2: either representation would be, well, alien to them. "Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed," reads the paper.

"These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo's legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth's technological civilization."
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A New Proposal For Interstellar Communication With Alien Intelligences More

A New Proposal For Interstellar Communication With Alien Intelligences

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  • The size and age of the universe incline us to believe that many technologically advanced civilisations must exist. However, this belief seems logically inconsistent with our lack of observational evidence to support it. Either the initial assumption is incorrect and technologically advanced intelligent life is much rarer than we believe, or our current observations are incomplete, and we simply have not detected them yet, or our search methodologies are flawed and we are not searching for the correct indic

    • Or... the aliens are smart/evolved enough to actively ignore us and shield their existence from us -- seriously, we're a shit-show.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by freax ( 80371 )

        That must be it. We are misgendering them so much that they have canceled us.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by freax ( 80371 )

          That .. or the Vogons have canceled earth so that they can build their intergalactic highway here. To avoid any protest voices from NIMBYs to be heard, they are silencing us.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          There was discussion of this in the 1980s when people started seriously trying to send out signals to nearby stars.

          The cold war was still on and people tried to use Game Theory to evaluate the pros and cons of doing it. If you go down that route, the best thing to do is hide. If some aliens detect transmissions form Earth, they might have the same idea: strike first or wait around to see if you get annihilated.

          • If some aliens detect transmissions form Earth, they might have the same idea: strike first or wait around to see if you get annihilated.

            Perhaps aliens are determined that we're probably going to annihilate ourselves long before they could get here so they can safely ignore us ...

    • it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.

      There's an alternative, not entirely unreasonable, explanation which is that no sensible civilisation would make itself known [bigthink.com] and that if a civilisation does then the other civilisations are almost certain to destroy it. Maybe these people should first get everybody's consent before broadcasting?

      • ...and/or a cryptofascist sociopath. You know... like Liu Cixin. [wikipedia.org]

      • The idea that there's these hyper-advanced but malevolent civilizations capable of projecting a conquering force across the galaxy (or between them), but they're incapable of finding you unless you send a radio signal, is preposterous thinking that originates from, and should stay confined to, Hollywood sci-fi movies. It's like suggesting that if people in Ukraine turned off their radios and lights last year, Russia never would have invaded them. It's ridiculous. There's nobody out there picking invasion ta

        • The idea that there's these hyper-advanced but malevolent civilizations capable of projecting a conquering force across the galaxy (or between them), but they're incapable of finding you unless you send a radio signal, is preposterous thinking that originates from, and should stay confined to, Hollywood sci-fi movies. It's like suggesting that if people in Ukraine turned off their radios and lights last year, Russia never would have invaded them. It's ridiculous. There's nobody out there picking invasion targets based on who has a particular type of signal going out.

          That's great twisted logic justification. Firstly, if this signal wasn't more likely to be picked up than background signalling then it doesn't make sense to send it. The whole aim is that alien civilisations should be able to see the signal over the background of space.

          The second and more important fact is that you don't have to conquer a civilisation to destroy it. Our current technological level puts us close to that. A high velocity asteroid will do fine. Travel to other planets is difficult to possib

    • The simpler explanation is that it's bloody hard to find anything at those distances. We can barely detect entire planets. Is it at all possible to detect the presence of life, or of an industrialized civilisation? Any signal would have to be strong and directional, and the odds of someone picking up ours, or us picking up theirs, are remote, and grow less likely with distance.
    • Why do people always assume that the technology to make interestellar travel possible is possible or achievable. Maybe physics donâ(TM)t allow for life to travel safely vast distances in reasonable times in space and every civilization in stuck in their home star not much more advanced than us.

      • It's the time factor that's the big problem. Human lifespans are too short unless you crack some magic code on FTL or find wormhole-type situations.

        Probably the only way to travel interstellar distances is by changing the reference window for time by transferring human consciousness into machines or some kind of cloning process which renews the bucket it sits in.

        • It's the time factor that's the big problem. Human lifespans are too short unless you crack some magic code on FTL or find wormhole-type situations.

          Just 1g constant acceleration (due primarily to length contraction) will win you a round trip ticket to anywhere in the reachable universe and back within a typical human lifetime. Just don't expect earth to still be there when you get back.

          Of course there are insane practical considerations that make this moot but there is no speed limit imposed on interstellar travelers. That is only imposed on spectators.

        • Merging human consciousness with machines for indefinite life in a cybernetic body is definitely possible though. It's the opposite of FTL travel... for it to *not* be possible, there'd need to be some physics-defying 'magic' to consciousness. Otherwise, it's just neuron firing patterns and regular atoms. So it's not impossible, just incredibly difficult. But eventually, you'd expect it to get figured out. You'd probably have to go from the ground up during development rather than tap into a grown organisms

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Why do people always assume that the technology to make interestellar travel possible is possible or achievable

        Why are you assuming transportation is what's being discussed?

      • in reasonable times

        A "reasonable time" has no particular meaning that will
        be applicable to humans as well as whatever is out there.

        Also, other animals can hibernate for extended periods,
        so there is no reason why humans could not do that
        as well.

    • Re:Fermi paradox (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Friday April 01, 2022 @05:19AM (#62407606)

      Theres all sorts of reasons for it.

      Good reasons

      1) We havent really been looking hard. Detecting coms using reasonable energy outputs from a technological output from a society talking with itself probably require dishes far beyond our capacity to build right now. Either they are too quiet or we are too deaf. Or where just looking in the wrong places.
      2) We havent been looking very long. 50 years maybe, a fraction of a blink on the scale of even human civilization, let along an ancient alien civ.
      3) They know we are here. And we're under quarantine because they think revealing themselves might make us lose our minds.

      So-So Reasons

      4) The aliens know we are here, and they just don't care.
      5) The aliens know we are here, and are very worried about us setting off nukes and beaming hitler's olympic madness into space in the 1940s. We might well be under "Leave them alone, unless they try to do something stupid in space" quarantine

      Bad reasons
      6) Being noisy is really really dumb. See Cixin Liu's Dark Forest Theory, or for an even more terifying version that relies on Game Theory , and probably was Cixin Liu's inspiration, the "holy shit stop making noise" scenario from the Killing Star novel. That thing kept me up at night.
      6) The great filter means that once a civilization gets far enough it nukes itself or at least CO2s up its climate until it might as well be nuked. Actuallly this is scarier than 5, because with 5 we could just decide to keep quiet, and it all goes away. Theres no escaping fate however, and 6 might be our undoing.

      • 3) They know we are here. And we're under quarantine because they think revealing themselves might make us lose our minds.

        Unlikely. We've been capable of radio for what, about 120 years? Which means if the hypothetical aliens are 150 light years away, they'll detect us in 30 years or so. And 99.99%+ of the stars in the Milky Way are MUCH further away than 150 light years (call it an average of 50,000 light years for the stars in this galaxy).

        Face it, unless the BEMs are so common that there are literal

      • I would lean towards 3 or 4, although 6 is always possible too. If the aliens exist it's extremely unlikely that they're at a similar technological level to us. Consider how much our civilization changed in the last couple of hundred years which is a tiny blip on a galactic timescale. They would likely be either in the Stone Age or vastly more advanced than us.

        Here on Earth the closest thing to such a huge technological difference would be Amazonian tribes or North Sentinel natives (https://en.wikipedia.or

      • T 6) Being noisy is really really dumb. See Cixin Liu's Dark Forest Theory, or for an even more terifying version that relies on Game Theory , and probably was Cixin Liu's inspiration, the "holy shit stop making noise" scenario from the Killing Star novel. That thing kept me up at night.

        I'm in the third book ("Death's End") now, it also is literally keeping me up at night! This theory deserves serious thought before we start shouting. Do we really want to be the annoying twidiots of the universe that someone can come squish like a bug with their advanced technology?

    • The problem is one of distance. Normal radio signals aren't going to make it very far (I think I've heard maybe a hundred light years before such a signal is rendered incoherent). So unless another civilization is close enough that they could watch an episode of I Love Lucy, they wouldn't know we're here, and vice versa. High powered communication methods like high powered lasers would do better, but that's highly directional, so you're going to have to know someone is there before it does any good. Somethi

      • High powered communication methods like high powered lasers would do better

        Hydrogen bombs would do vastly better, in terms of power,
        spread and range of wavelengths. Perhaps we could put
        a few hundred HBombs (from the tens of thousands
        sitting around uselessly on Earth) and put them in orbit
        around the moon. Then, set them off as they come
        over the far side at intervals that would be in some mathematical
        series like Fibonacci: 1 hour apart, 2 hours, 3 hours, 5 hours, 8 hours, etc.

        We could do this, but should we?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Or the universe is just really really big..

      I think better question when it comes to searching for extra terrestrial intelligent life is why bother?

      Until we have some new physics that at least suggests better than light speed travel is possible, or that near-to-light speed travel with reasonable acceleration and deceleration times is achievable within a useful energy budget it seems rather pointless. Right now it does not look like it would ever be worth while to trade or exchange anything. It does not even

      • Even talking to our nearest solar neighbor is something like 4.5 years round trip at light speed; most likely any aliens out there will be further away, much further.
        Nope, roundtrip would be something like 9 years.
        BUT: the funny thing is, in the Alpha Centauri System is a planet in the habitable zone.

      • aI think better question when it comes to searching for extra terrestrial intelligent life is why bother?

        Because we would like to know whether there are any
        technologically advanced civilizations out there. At
        least we would know whether or not we are alone
        in the Milky Way.

    • There is no paradox.

      Given that the majority of intelligent life in the galaxy has 3 fingers (we're the odd man out with 5), and that aliens are already here [hulu.com] the Fermi Equation is another example of Scientists coming up with a bad equation using assumptions due to outdated (or missing) information / knowledge.

      In ~30 years the equation will be discarded since by 2050 it will be common knowledge that we're not alone in the universe.

      If you really want to bake your noodle mull over the question: "Why do aliens b

    • We are only searching for ETs that actually are trying to send a message.

      a) why would they be so stupid to do that
      b) how would we find one who is not directly beaming at us?

      Keep in mind: the solar system is moving with a speed of 514,000 mph through the galaxy. That is something like 4.503 billion miles per year!! However as comparison, that is only about the orbit of Pluto.

      Depending from where one would beam information to us: we are a hard to hit target.
      Likelihood that we ever communicate with extraterres

    • It's pretty clear 'We're not looking' is a big part of it. 1) Searching for radio is pointless. Only a hugely powerful signal pointed straight at us from cosmologically close by stands a chance of being above the noise floor. So the lack of radio signals means nothing.

      2) There's any number of reasons nobody would be interested in building megastructures so huge we'd see them; nobody out there isn't a good explanation for lack of observed structures, since for us to see them, we're talking about larger th

  • If they're capable of receiving the signal, they'll figure out quickly it is not random, and not natural. Regularity and mathematics are the keys to decoding it, and as far as we know mathematics is universal.

    • Hmm, just to point out an absurdity.. The concept of "Universal as far as we know it", is limited to Earth, a human construct, projection and an assumption. As if we could really know something is Universal without exploring the entire Universe, which is quite literally impossible. We apply the concept of everything we learn here on Earth and in our tiny little orbit to the entirety of the Universe, which we don't even know is a Universe or a Multiverse or WTF it is... Beyond that, something being unive

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      And then they can send a death projectile at our sun to snuff us all out. We should learn why the universe is silent before making a loud noise.

    • Unicode won't work. The aliens use Slashdot.

  • That seems a little insane to convey such a small solution. But.. Instead of 1+1=2 I suggest a more primitive method which is almost universally understandable immediately upon viewing and that's conveying that same problem in Roman numerals. I + I = II You almost instantly understand what is going on here. It may be hard to understand what the shape of the symbol '2' means and even '+' and '=', but a roman numeral 1 could just be construed as a single mark of some sort which could lead them to understan
    • The logic of 1+1=2 can be philosophically confusing since adding clouds becomes 1+1=1 or in human reproduction 1+1=3 or with paramecium, 1=2. Matching the abstract to the specific relationship can vary substantially depending upon what form life might take. Plus as a concept varies in very strange ways. Otherwise, the eagerness that current humanity displays in destroying itself clearly demonstrates that humanity is a transitional life form and the final form may be so different that by the time any message

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I think you would have to assume that any alien race that got the message and was capable of replying would be able to understand fairly complex maths, or decode diagrams of things like atoms which are universally the same everywhere.

        • The human mind accepts incoming information as integrations of simultaneous sense input which automatically chops away and discards what it presumes as irrelevant. Its standards for this discard process can be inherited or out of experience, and automatic variations of these collections are stored metaphorically at various levels of abstractions. What we designate as thinking is the automatic dendritic generation of metaphoric relationships which are made available to the conscious mind to be judged as to i

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Without those mathematics that are universal it won't be possible to build equipment capable of sending a reply, so it makes no difference in terms of contacting aliens.

            In fact without those mathematics they won't be able to receive and demodulate the signal either.

            • At the age of 96 I have been privileged to witness the vast revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos and that length of time has encompassed a most minuscule time period of possibility, No one is qualified to make absolute judgements about the universality of anything in this vast unknown university, mathematically or otherwise..
      • But any civilization that has the capacity of receiving and analyzing our signals will no doubt have the ability to count things.
        They will also have the understanding that there are rare exceptions such as you mention, but the generic basic counting is no doubt universal.
        One star plus another star is two stars.

        How about sending signals in the form of:

        beep.... beep beep.... beep beep beep.... beep beep beep beep.... etc...
        • And who can say that the concept of a thing might be so alien it never was considered? Our language is a relationship of abstract generalities and perhaps even that fundamental is dealt with in ways incomprehensible to us.
          • They built the gear to receive our signals.
            Consider what was necessary to focus electromagnetic waves and to store the data and interpret it...
            • Especially if they exist under liquid nitrogen and the concept of fire or electron manipulation is too far fetched to be practical for any utility.
              • But then they cannot receive our signals, and it is not relevant for them how our signals look.
                • And this is probably the case in the overwhelming majority of what life is out there that might be presumed intelligent. Even if the general ecology of an extra solar planet matches that of Earth, the possible variation of life development that is even slightly Earthlike is probably negligible. A gauge on that can be seen as to our success in fully communicating with our close relatives like whales, dolphins, bonobos, octopuses, etc who have radically different intellectual viewpoints. Pseudo humans on crea
                  • And even trees can be considered closer relatives in communication than the life on a planet that swings around a distant star where their communications through networks of fungi in which their bark might have an intellect through their byte.

    • So first show a mapping of units to numbers in a table (going up to a few dozen to establish base-10). Then we continue on with Arabic numerals.
        = 0
      o = 1
      oo = 2
      ooo = 3

    • I + I = II

      Aliens: "Eleven? They're morons. Ignore them."

  • I found a way to communicate with distant worlds at speeds faster than light at gigabytes per second.
    It is not the most reliable connection. But I can prove that half of the bits arrive correctly. Just a matter of sending everything twice I guess.
    Want to watch invest? Send me a message. ;-)
    • No, because how do you know the exact other half of the bits that weren't received are going to be what is received on 2nd transmission? What if the bit errors are completely random and 2nd transmission still has some same bits missing???.. Two Transmissions doesn't guarantee SHIT.

  • Admittedly it's extrapolating from a single data point (humans), but - I think it's arguable that sending "hey we are over here!" messages indiscriminately is a bad idea. In human history, the drive to explore the unknown was typically driven by tyrants looking for new lands to conquer - that could also describe the most likely scenario pushing alien civilizations out into the galaxy.

    • Admittedly it's extrapolating from a single data point (humans), but - I think it's arguable that sending "hey we are over here!" messages indiscriminately is a bad idea. In human history, the drive to explore the unknown was typically driven by tyrants looking for new lands to conquer - that could also describe the most likely scenario pushing alien civilizations out into the galaxy.

      Yea maybe, but that's assuming they're anything like as and merely half as violent.

      • Or maybe humanity is a shining beacon of peace and rationality, compared to the average alien civilisation. Ever thought of that?

      • Yea maybe, but that's assuming they're [aliens] anything like as and merely half as violent.

        If you look around at other Earth species, most are complete arseholes. The average human looks like a saint by comparison.
        But the Earth exploring expeditions of the 15th and 16th centuries did not tend to recruit saints for the trip, and if aliens arrive here to explore Earth, don't expect them to be saints either.

    • Apparently none of the people behind this project have read what happens when a technologically-superior civilization meets a less-advanced one. And you don't even need "tyrants looking for new lands to conquer" to understand who loses in that exchange, just ordinary contact between people is enough to determine the outcome.

    • I suppose there's always that risk, but the risk is based on the assumption that even an aggressive alien species can get to us in some reasonable amount of time (by whatever standard such a species would set). Even if there was an industrial civilization capable of space travel in the Alpha Centauri system, unless they have some fantastical technology that allows them travel the four light years or so within a lifetime or two, they'd have to put up with a voyage of tens of thousands of years.

      So, even at th

    • That's exceedingly unlikely to hold when you consider that any civilization capable of getting here wouldn't be able to obtain anything from Earth not more easily obtained from shallower gravity wells or empty planets with no higher life to fight back. But if you want to extrapolate from humans, fine. Conquering is no longer the drive for exploration. Imperialism trends downward as technological civilization progresses; it's not gone yet, but compare now to 200 years ago, and project that same trend 200 yea

  • But when I do I use 7-bit ASCII.

    Also I use all-caps so my message will stand out among all the idle chatter.

  • It's not very important that a alien species immediately understands how to decode our communication attempts. As they'll have millions of earth years to figure it out. Given that it'll have taken millions of years for them to receive it. And that it'll take the same amount of time for us to receive their answer.

    What is more important is that they can preserve the message for that amount of time. And that they can pass it on from generation to generation accurately.

    Also important for us is to survive and no

  • galaxies-1641454_final [arxiv.org].

    This actually contains the answer to the OP's question:

    However, as in the Evpatoria Transmissions, we found that using the conventional symbols for many mathematical operators is highly prone to interpretation and transmission error. Thus, the BITG message will include identical formatting in the “alphabet” from the Evpatoria Transmissions for concepts including: the aforementioned operators, equals sign, dot symbol, meters, elements, and seconds [14 [smithsonianmag.com]].

    The reference 14 expands further:

    The symbols are designed to be resistant to signal degradation. A single flipped bit could make an 8 into a 0, or a 1 into a 7. They are also designed to be hard to confuse with each other even if corrupted by noise. Furthermore, none of the symbols are rotated or mirrored images of any others, so the message will still be intact even if the recipients construct it upside-down or in mirror-reverse.

  • You have to consider if it's smart to send out strong radiosignals.

    Especially when taking in consideration we don't see any ourselves. So, since we were not invited to any party. every else is either hiding, hunting or being eaten. Assuming they (alines/lifeforms) are rare or non-existent also assumes we are a very rare statistical fluke, which is unlikely.

    There's a reason why everyone else is hiding. And we better figure out why first.

  • Earth has been sending out strong self-correlating signals in the form of radio and TV broadcasts for some time. Possibly the first ones that aliens will have seen (or will see when the signals reach them) are Hitler's rally speeches.

    • Lovely mustache! I'm pretty sure Aliens will wear it so as not to startle us humans too much when they come around for the first encounter...

    • But most of those signals are not really all that strong. We've pretty much been openly broadcasting for a little over a century, with most of the spurious activity (like TV) since the 1960s. And the power of such signals is enough to propagate around Earth. The light cone of such transmissions isn't going to be that big, so they will degrade over any significant distances. I have my doubts that anyone much further than a hundred light years away would even notice us over the background radiation of their o

  • Can we try and find intelligent life here first?

    It would be rather embarrassing to meet aliens only to show that the best we have are meme drunk morons too stupid to operate a toddler's pop-up book.

  • tldr; If they are seriously hoping to transmit from Earth to the universe I seriously hope they get stopped first. The odds seem much higher that if it works at all, it is a Bad(TM) idea.

  • If you totally discount the fact that they have already came here or are here , that would be quite a bit pretentious.
    There's too much evidence laying all around via the various army corps everywhere on the planet and in space to dismiss the possibility. To try to broadcast very far might not be the best way to go. Perhaps , and im not convinced either way , we should look in our backyards and way closer to home than we're feeling comfortable with.

  • Funded for the sole purpose of keeping nerds busy and out of trouble.

  • This is a waste of time. Spend time working on faster-than-light communication and travel (portals/teleportation) if you actually want to speak to them. Either that or just figure out how to unmask the ones that walk amongst us daily in disguise. Then maybe you can figure out how to punish the ones that are really rapey.

    • Note that they're also really stupid and lazy after millennia of technology doing literally everything for them. They're not gonna waste time trying to figure out your stupid puzzles. They'd rather be bodysnatching and raping.

  • 1 + 1 = 2

    ... was from the fish [slashdot.org].

  • We aren't looking for intelligent life. We're looking for ourselves and no that isn't some new age BS. What I mean is that we are trying to communicate with something that cares about radio signals which are only our choice of information propagation because of a whole truck load of very specific requirements. For example, we modulate in frequencies we can't detect visually or audibly and that doesn't harm us. Imagine a species that instead developed their form of communication to use gamma radiation as a c

    • Now let's look at motivation. We're only interested in reaching out because as monkey's we are social creatures. We imagine that this is the only path to success because that's what evolution, constrained by the million and one other tiny aspects of our planet, taught us is the only way. If a species children inherit the parents life experiences for instance, there would be no need to exchange information so reaching out of your immediate social circle would be pointless. If a species is able to reproduce w

  • Lem (Score:2)

    by guygo ( 894298 )

    See Stanislaw Lem's "His Master's Voice" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Given that humans know zero about aliens and their civilization, it is incredibly stupid to send messages to the aliens and expect, some sort of, good response.. The last thing the human race wants is to wake up and see giant spaceships from aliens parked in the earth's orbit. Who knows, they might be friendly, but they might also destroy the human race within the next day to procure earth for, say, for a picnic.

  • ...finally get an answer — in ten thousand years or so.

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