Sun's Twin Discovered — the Perfect SETI Target? 168
astroengine writes "There are 10 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are the same size as our sun. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that astronomers have identified a clone to our sun lying only 200 light-years away. Still, it is fascinating to imagine a yellow dwarf that is exactly the same mass, temperature and chemical composition as our nearest star. In a recent paper reporting on observations of the star — called HP 56948 — astronomer Jorge Melendez of the University of San Paulo, Brazil, calls it 'the best solar twin known to date.' Using HP 56948 as a SETI target seems like a logical step, says Melendez."
Re:Pointless? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pointless? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message [wikipedia.org]
There have been many intentional messages sent.
Wrong name (Score:4, Informative)
Re:it's actually the same sun in a funhouse mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Close. It's our sun, but in the evil twin universe. Or are we the evil twin? Hard to say, really.
Hoping that we are the Evil Twin. The women are always better in the Evil Twin Universes.
Re:Is it in Gemini? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Informative)
It's great to go back and watch this particular episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: Encyclopedia Galactica [hulu.com]. He goes through the basic idea of the Drake Equation, opines on listening/detecting life elsewhere in the galaxy. It's really great stuff, and worth watching whether you've seen it before or not.
Basic maths (Score:5, Informative)
I like how they mention that the 23 row by 73 column interpretation is "jumbled garbage". The correct image also looks like jumbled garbage. I especially like the image of a human. How the hell is an alien supposed to figure out what that is without having seen a human before?
The most basic possible message: counting.
Before the human-shaped pixel art, the sequence begins with a simple count, with increasing binary numbers from 1 to 10.
It's a pattern, which is recognizable without any cultural reference, only with some knowledge of math, which is needed to handle the radio signal any way, and this pattern is clearly not a random occurrence. Turn the data the other way around and you don't see any easily recognisable pattern at the begin, so they know it's the wrong way.
If you want to make it clear that a message is a message and not garbage, you try to cram in something that is clearly not random, but that is as simple basic maths as possible :
counting from 0 to some number, list of prime numbers, fibonacci sequence...
Then you could append whatever you want. Life forms at the receiving end might not be able to understand what you mean with your picture, but at least they now they've organised the data correctly because that's the only way where the begining makes some sense in a mathematical way.