Thu, 06 Aug 2015
A message to the aliens (introduction)
In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and
Yvan Dutil, composed and sent a message into space. The message
was composed of twenty-three pages of bitmapped data, and was sent
from the RT-70
radio telescope in Yevpatoria, Ukraine, as part of a set of
messages called Cosmic
Call.
The message images themselves are extremely compelling. I saw the first one in the book Beyond Contact by Brian McConnell:
Sometimes when I gave conference talks, I would put this image on the screen during break, to give people something to think about before the class started up again. I like to say that it's fun to see if you're as smart as an alien, or at least if as smart as the Canadian astrophysicists thought the aliens would be.
I invite you to try to understand what is going on in the first image, above. In a day or two I will post a full explanation, along with the second image. Over the next few weeks I hope to write a series of blog articles about the 23 pages, explaining the details of each.
If you can't wait that long for the full set, you can browse them here, or download a zip file.
Addendum 20151223: The series is now complete. The full set of articles is:
- Common features
- Page 1 (numerals)
- Page 2 (arithmetic)
- Page 3 (exponents)
- Page 4 (algebra)
- Page 5 (geometry)
- Page 6 (chemistry)
- Page 7 (mass)
- Page 8 (time and space)
- Page 9 (physical units)
- Page 10 (temperature)
- Page 11 (solar system)
- Page 12 (Earth-Moon system)
- Page 13 (days, months, and years)
- Page 14 (terrain)
- Page 15 (human anatomy)
- Page 16 (vital statistics)
- Page 17 (DNA chemistry)
- Page 18 (cell respiration and division)
- Pages 19-20 (map of the Earth)
- Page 21 (the message)
- Page 22 (cosmology)
- Page 23 (wat)
[Other articles in category /aliens/dd] permanent link