After 35 Years, Another Message Sent From Arecibo 249
0xdeadbeef writes "Two weeks ago, MIT artist-in-residence Joe Davis used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message to three stars in honor of the 35th anniversary of the famous Drake-Sagan transmission to M13 in 1974. It was apparently allowed but not endorsed by the director of the facility, and used a jury-rigged signal source on what will now be known as the 'coolest iPhone in the world.' The message encoded a DNA sequence, but no word yet on whether it disabled any alien shields. You can get the low-down on Centauri Dreams: Part 1, Part 2."
And it was (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
Practical joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Without any context --- e.g., our biochemistry, amino acid structure, nature of DNA --- this message amounts to about the worst practical joke in the history of interstellar communication. It has a relatively non-random structure, so clearly must mean something, and yet they'll never figure it out.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:1, Insightful)
Pretty sure the power drops off with an inverse square law.
Exponential != really fast. It's really really really really fast, eventually.
Ok really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire Wikipedia section on the production of titanium is a little under 4 kilobytes, which would take a bit over an hour to transmit at those rates. Imagine an alien species has a new ultra-efficient titanium refining process - would you wait a day to get the summary of it downloaded for your scientists? I sure as hell would.
The two-hundred-year transmission lag to go a hundred lightyears is a far bigger issue than the bandwidth.
The message was so lame (Score:4, Insightful)
So if you're going to send a message, you have to choose one. What did he choose? The DNA sequence for an enzyme.
We used Apple's "Speak" option to vocalize the phonetic code which I then recorded on my iPhone. Here is a fragment of the total message, the whole of which can be decoded unambiguously into the gene for RuBisCo:
Tell me how, exactly, the recipient is going to decode a DNA sequence, even if the basic message can be identified as strings of 2-bit numbers? Not only is DNA specific (as far as we know) to Earth chemistry, but the meanings of the codons, and even the choice to interpret them in triplets is the result of chance evolution on this planet. It's like sending a message in Navajo to Paris, with the assumption that it can be "decoded unambigiously"... because the sender knew what it meant. The meanings of DNA codons are absolutely not a universal constant like binary math is.
knowyourself riddleoflife amthe riddleoflife amthe amthe riddleoflife riddleoflife
<facepalm> Not that the choice of words would mean anything to them, but this shows the touchy-feely-ness that goes along with the lack of foresight that was already demonstrated.
Say what you will about Sagan's message, but at least they put some thought into making a message that gave hints as to how to decode it, rather than just sending some unframed binary mish-mash.
Or (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine if what becomes of humans in 1 million years or so intercept the transmission. It would be like digging up an old fossil record of DNA.
Re:Practical joke (Score:4, Insightful)
>>But if they do figure it out, we'll get a message a century from now: "Delicious! Do you have any other recipes?"
Sadly, people rarely stop to wonder if the messages we're sending into outer space are a good idea. Aliens with a good grasp of game theory might just very well decide to drop a meteor onto any planet they find broadcasting into outer space. You know... just to be sure.
I actually find it sort of thoughtless that people like this are taking the entire fate of the world into their hands. Dramatic? Not so much, if you really stop to think about it.
Re:Ok really? (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope its a waste of money, but there is a tiny chance it is a lot worse: something listening might actually be able to come here. Historically when the "guys on the ships" meet the "guys on the shore", the guys on the shore don't do very well. One could also make an argument that if you detect an alien culture, your best bet is to launch a relativistic bomb (or the information equivalent).
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:1, Insightful)
"stimulates even one young person to do that calculation for themselves" != "force young people to do similar calculations"
Being interested in science and doing things because you want to is very different from just doing it because you have to to pass the class you're taking because you have to.
Dangerous (Score:2, Insightful)
We have no idea if the receiver is friendly. Based on human behavior, we can roughly guess that at least 10% of any/all intelligent receivers will be agressive. Why broadcast our location with those odds? It's not logical.
Re:Dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, because we already broadcast enough, so sending yet another message does not really matter anymore. What I worry is our regular TV programming, which in the eyes of any advanced culture should make earth look like it's populated with some crazy monkeys flinging shit at each other.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:2, Insightful)
But *why* is it still the square of the distance when I always thought that was just a natural consequence of the increase in volume of a sphere as it's radius increases? If antenna gain makes no difference, then why bother with it at all?
Because although the covered area is much smaller, it still grows quadratically with distance (there simply is no such thing as an exactly parallel beam). The antenna makes a difference in that you get a higher signal in the desired direction to begin with. If your signal is e.g. 25 times as strong in a certain direction, it will remain 25 times as strong even after millions of lightyears. So at a distance where the weak signal would be barely detectable, you still have 25 times the threshold, which should be clearly detectable. Indeed, 25 times the strength means 5 times the reach, due to the inverse scale law.
Re:Representation of the solar system in the messa (Score:4, Insightful)
Pluto is a planet, it's just one of 5 dwarf planets. So yes, to be completely accurate, they'd either need to ditch Pluto or add Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
All that said, I'm guessing 'ET' woouldn't give two shits about the dwarf planets. He'd see the gas giants, and maybe our 4 inner planets. If they looked really close, they might see some assorted rocky and icy belts, but nothing worth mentioning compared to the other planets.
Of course, part of the idea of dwarf planets is to make them open ended, so you don't need to memorize all of them. The analogy is to mountains: there are lots of mountains, people don't memorize them all, but they're still given special recognition.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
One bit per second is good enough for the Navy...
Yes, but only because they have prearranged short codes for orders that are likely to be given. A message only a handful of characters long can be useful under those circumstances.