this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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4GB is an absolute fuck ton of text. Like, solid chunk of Wikipedia would fit in there.
If you were restricted to just 700MM words, what would you say?
Help. Thatβs it, thatβs all Iβd say
Probably just send them the encyclopedia brittanica
the other day I learned you can download Wikipedia and it's something like 50 GB of text plus 50 GB of pictures
Nah, it's 22 GB for just the current English version, text-only Wikipedia. Adding the media English current version only would be 140 GB (plus the 22 GB for the text). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
So you could do text-only Wikipedia and probably compress it. Maybe drop a few thousand of the articles that don't matter or are stubs. Drop all the entertainment articles, etc.
Or send only the entertainment articles. Why wouldn't the aliens want to hear about the life and exploits of Leonardo DiCaprio?
A few years ago (~2010) I had the entire German Wikipedia on my 8gb iPod touch. It was only about 4gb in size without media.
So you send them text that they can't read?
I don't think you appreciate how much text you can fit into 4GB. The first entire gigabyte could be dedicated to various means of translation and explaining our language system, and you'd still have a 500 million words left after that.
You can also get 2-3 movies worth with 4gb depending on its length and quality. Maybe even more.
So they need to understand our colors, video codecs, displays, sound, and so much more?