8th August 2006, 2:21 PM
The fact is we know exactly what sort of math we can expect, no matter how it's expressed. Ever see that movie with the people who went to mars and found the big stone face and all that insane garbage? Well they got one thing right. Remember seeing those symbols going through their courses on the floor? Those were not very clear at all, but it didn't matter. Just watching them for a few seconds it was immediatly clear that not only was it a binary counting thing, it was counting down.
That's the sort of thing we can do. We can send "pulse... pulse pulse.... pulse pulse pulse pulse..." (and so on up to 256 or whatever) and it'll be pretty clear to any intelligence. From there you can send fibbernachi sequences, mathematical constants of the universe, and so on. Mathematical sequences are very easy to translate, as opposed to language (look at how long it took to translate egyptian), so we can explain to them very clearly exactly what we know at this point, and perhaps some other mathematical details about us as a species, that'll explain things in more detail and more accuratly than any art could. We could explain via science exactly who we are as we currently understand ourselves and that'll help them a LOT more than artistic expression. Art is an abstraction after all. We could send the art after telling them how we understand our mind to come up with such things and then they could look at that, and MAYBE get an idea of what it means.
The fact is, for them to get to the technological level to intercept our messages, they HAVE to know certain things we know. They couldn't build such things otherwise. That is the stuff we have to send, because what they do NOT have to know is how to make a story that is engaging to the human brain or a song that speaks to our particular rythm recognition programming, or especially a poem that represents certain aspects of a specific society on our planet.
I should have posted this in debate. I had no idea people would actually disagree with this.
That's the sort of thing we can do. We can send "pulse... pulse pulse.... pulse pulse pulse pulse..." (and so on up to 256 or whatever) and it'll be pretty clear to any intelligence. From there you can send fibbernachi sequences, mathematical constants of the universe, and so on. Mathematical sequences are very easy to translate, as opposed to language (look at how long it took to translate egyptian), so we can explain to them very clearly exactly what we know at this point, and perhaps some other mathematical details about us as a species, that'll explain things in more detail and more accuratly than any art could. We could explain via science exactly who we are as we currently understand ourselves and that'll help them a LOT more than artistic expression. Art is an abstraction after all. We could send the art after telling them how we understand our mind to come up with such things and then they could look at that, and MAYBE get an idea of what it means.
The fact is, for them to get to the technological level to intercept our messages, they HAVE to know certain things we know. They couldn't build such things otherwise. That is the stuff we have to send, because what they do NOT have to know is how to make a story that is engaging to the human brain or a song that speaks to our particular rythm recognition programming, or especially a poem that represents certain aspects of a specific society on our planet.
I should have posted this in debate. I had no idea people would actually disagree with this.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)