51–60 of 88 posts
Sending an archive of YouTube would be much more useful for any aliens that happen to drop by. YT comes far closer to The Sum of All Human Knowledge than Wikipedia.
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Keep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing. There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook t…
Imagine how disappointed the aliens will be to find our disc full of the boring old "discoveries" of a barely space-fairing species. Nothing to see here, move along.
How long would it survive there? The surface of the moon is a pretty hostile environment, I would think.
That being said no one is sure how often it gets hit but it is logically far far less than Earth.
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Well hypothetically if the Earth was destroyed by grey-goo or something, the disc would still be there. But the other answer is that it's much easier to find. Where would you put a ceramic copy of wikipedia on Earth to maximize it's probability of being found? Anywhere you put it could get destroyed, buried, or stolen. Who knows what will happen to it over the Eons. This disc will be on the surface of the moon foreve…
This disc will be on the surface of the moon forever. Or until a meteorite hits it.
2 200GB MicroSDs would give you 400GB of storage weighing in at only 1 gram.
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Keep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing. There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook t…
One of my favorite short stories is That Alien Message : http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ Its about humanity trying to reverse engineer a message from space that has very few bits. One of the morals is that humans would be able to decode crazy encodings provided enough time. And more data helps a lot. With 20 GB, even compressed, common patterns could quickly be found. I don't believe for a moment a rac…
20GB? What kind of disc are they using? Why not use a 200GB MicroSD? That would be way more efficient. 2 200GB MicroSDs would give you 400GB of storage weighing in at only 1 gram.
> Can’t we use some other medium with more space?
> The conditions in space prove hostile to many data mediums. Traditional CDs or DVDs would be destroyed in space, because they are composed of layers and would come undone. It’s different with a medium made of ceramics. Also, you have to consider the dimensions and weight of your medium. The ceramic disc is light enough and resilient.
I'm guessing microSD cards are not radiation hardened.
20GB? What kind of disc are they using? Why not use a 200GB MicroSD? That would be way more efficient. 2 200GB MicroSDs would give you 400GB of storage weighing in at only 1 gram.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ#Ca... > Can’t we use some other medium with more space? > The conditions in space prove hostile to many data mediums. Traditional CDs or DVDs would be destroyed in space, because they are composed of layers and would come undone. It’s different with a medium made of ceramics. Also, you have to consider the dimensions and weight of your medium. The ceramic disc…
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It does indeed. However compression may cause problems for future beings discovering or understanding the data.
Keep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing. There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook t…
Let's suppose the aliens already did this, but instead of a small disc, they wanted to send a message that no intelligent being could miss. Over a short span of 150,000 years, they redirected a bunch meteors into the moon in a pattern that encodes the last few digits of pi in a simplified resonant-fractal numbering system, which proves they know the angular momentum of the universe with fair precision. Clear and convincing evidence that would be visible throughout the solar system.
So yeah, I think no matter what we do to try to communicate with an alien intelligence, they would have to be very much like us (probably our own descendants or - who knows - ancestors) to even recognize the presence of the simplest message, much less decode it.
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Imagine how disappointed the aliens will be to find our disc full of the boring old "discoveries" of a barely space-fairing species. Nothing to see here, move along.
Nah, the aliens are bound to have tons of post-doc archaeologists looking for faculty positions.
I'm only half being sarcastic, as I've gotten lost in some of those articles trying to figure out who someone is... while I'm not sure of the encyclopedic value of those articles, they definitely have some entertainment value. For that matter, it may be worth clarifying fictional characters from those that are historic, or based on historic events.
One concept that always got me is the premise of an alien culture without sarcasm. They would have a very hard time with human culture/history.