Asklemmy

44165 readers

1532 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

If you were tasked with putting together a message to send to space aliens, with the only restriction that the message had to be under 4GB, what would you send? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

82 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the actual messages humanity has sent into space in the hopes that aliens will hear it since those are actually pretty cool.

I mean look at this crap. Look at how cool it looks. https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.pdf

(I'm on mobile otherwise I'd add a picture)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.pdf

Again a cringe Word PDF title (why cant this program use normal Titles?)
Why tf didnt they just draw our numbers and instead some crazy art stuff?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's explained in the PDF. If they used normal numbers and letters, the chance of corruption would be high. So they had to reform into the symbols you see.

I still don't get why we use Pi instead of Tau though, when most equations double it up into Tau anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The dimension (physical height, 5'9") of an average man (blue/white)

Well thanks now they think we are all men

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's kinda cool but not sure why they thought creating a new set of pictograms that aren't used on Earth was the best method

https://xkcd.com/927/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

So that the symbols would be less likely to get corrupted if the aliens received it over a bad radio link