The Universe of Disco

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:

I didn't think much of the rest of the book, but the image was arresting. After staring at it for a while, and convincing myself I understood the basic idea, I found the full set of images on Mike Matessa's web site, printed them out, and spent a happy couple of hours at the kitchen table deciphering them.

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:

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