Comment on Talk like an đ˝
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org â¨9⊠â¨hours⊠agoas long as they can decide the transmission.
That is the Problem. Even something as basic as a simple transmission can become quite hard to decode when you canât make any assumptions about how their technology works. This may start with things as simple as that they might not use binary logic, but tertiary logic instead. They might not use 8 bits as a smallest package of date. And then we have the big problems of how do we actually decode it. We as humans have tables for which bit sequence means which character, they probably dont have the same. They might use different logical levels/protocols for communicating single bits and so on. Sending a simple message to be decoded by aliens is everything but simple.
that they might not use binary logic, but tertiary logic instead. They might not use 8 bits as a smallest package of data.
People did both of those things in computers. They have also decoded encrypted messages where they didnât know the algorithm or the key. And, as others have said, in this case you start with simple messages, establishing the basic boundaries of transmission, before trying to communicate most primitive ideas.
I confess, I was kind of baiting with the âdecode the transmissionâ part. As someone else mentioned, the way we send the info doesnât have to be as complicated as what youâre thinking. Many books and movies have been made about the subject⌠Contact and Project Hail Mary come to mind immediately. SETI is dedicated to being on the receiving end and makes assumptions about what ET would be sending based on assumptions about what we would send (filtering for repeating patterns and mathematical structures on narrow frequency bands).
In any case, how we transmit and what we transmit are two different things. What we transmit will likely be math and/or cosmos related, things we have in common with our galactic cousins (we assume). How we transmit⌠There are a million ways, so we narrow it down to what we think is the most likely to reach the target and be something theyâre listening for. And cross our fingers.
Jolteon@lemmy.zip â¨9⊠â¨hours⊠ago
That really only matters at higher levels of communication, not the barebone basics that weâre talking about here. When we are referring to 1, 2, 3, etc., weâre not referring to our ASCII representations of the numbers. Weâre referring to literal pulses or some kind of other countable thing. While sending what a layman would call a simple message would be difficult, the kind of simple message we are talking about is very doable.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org â¨9⊠â¨hours⊠ago
It is of course possible, but we still have to translate it