Submission + - A new proposal for interstellar communication with alien intelligences (arxiv.org) 1
OneHundredAndTen writes: A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate — for example, for 1 + 1 = 2 the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1 + 1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1 + 1 = 2: either representation would be — well, alien to them.
Easier for you does not always mean better. (Score:2)
I'm still trying to parse all this, but I think they're reusing previous work. Which is why they don't explain why it's better.
"... the Evpatoria Transmission Messages (ETMs,) sent in 1999 and 2003, also transmitted in binary, invented an easily distinguishable alphabet system and included an exhaustive list of our basic mathematics and physics knowledge [14]."
"However, as in the Evpatoria Transmissions, we found that using the conventional symbols for many mathematical operators is highly prone to interpr