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+--- Thread: What if? Contact with another alien civilization (/showthread.php?tid=132446)
What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Pavel - 08-08-2015
Here's some cool text I just read, and which made me think about our expectations of the "first contact" and potential results of such.
36,400,000
That is the expected number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, according to Drake's famous equation. For the last 78 years, we have been broadcasting everything about us—our radio, our television, our history, our greatest discoveries—to the rest of the galaxy. We have been shouting our existence at the top of our lungs to the rest of the universe, wondering if we were alone. 36 million civilizations, yet in almost a century of listening, we haven't heard a thing. We were alone.
That was, until about five minutes ago.
The transmission came on every transcendental multiple of hydrogen's frequency that we're listening to. Transcendental harmonics—things like hydrogens' frequency times pi—don't appear in nature, so I knew it had to be artificial. The signal pulsed on and off very quickly with incredibly uniform amplitudes; my initial reaction was that this was some sort of binary transmission. I measured 1679 pulses in the one minute that the transmission was active. After that, the silence resumed.
The numbers didn't make any sense at first. They just seemed to be a random jumble of noise, but the pulses were so perfectly uniform, and on a frequency that was always so silent; they had to come from an artificial source. I looked over the transmission again, and my heart skipped a beat. 1679—that was the exact length of the Arecibo message sent out 40 years ago. I excitedly started arranging the bits in the original 73 x 23 rectangle. I didn't get more than halfway through before my hopes were confirmed. This was the exact same message. The numbers in binary, from 1 to 10. THe atomic numbers of the elements that make up life. The formulas for our DNA nucleotides. Someone had been listening to us, and wanted us to know they were there.
Then it came to me—this original message was transmitted only 40 years ago. This means that life must be at most 20 light-years away. A civilzationn within talking distance? This would revolutionize every field I have ever worked in—astrophysics, astrobiology, astro-
The signal beeped again.
This time, it is slow. Deliberate, even. It last just under 5 minutes, with a new bit coming in once per second. Though the computers were of course recording, it, I started writing them down. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 0...l knew immediately this wasn't the same essagee as before. My mind raced through the possiblitiess of what this could be. The transmission ended, having transmitted 248 bits. Surely this is too small for a meaningful message. What great message to another civilization can you possibly send with only 248 bits of information? On a computer, the only files that small would be limited to...
Text.
Was it possible? Were they really sending a message to us in our own language? Come to think of it, it's not that out of the question—we had been transmitting pretty much every language on Earth for the last 70 years... I began to decipher with the first encoding scheme I could think of—ASCII. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 1. 0. 0. That's B... 0. 1. 10. 0. 1. 0. 1. E...
As I finished piecing together the message, my stomach sank like an anchor. The words before me answered everything.
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SpoilerRE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Mephistoles - 08-08-2015
I recognise this from HFY.
There are some very good HFY stories.
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Johnathan Nox Carter - 08-08-2015
I'm not sure if you're fine with me posting here... and to be honest i'm not sure how to take the text above, as a theory, as literature... but i just want to say, it's amazingly well written.
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Shizune - 08-08-2015
I have theorized over the existence of other life, I came back to a question that I could not answer myself. What if humans are aliens themselves and our gods are really just technologyly advanced humans that escaped our home? Think of it like this, we can't explain many thing that has happened around us, why humans advanced so quickly then any other race that existed before in this solar system. Look at Mars, a few years ago it had no atmosphere, or barely any, and today it can support the advrage dust devil or two. Venus used to be like earth but formed with no fault lines, thus over time she just melted. Look at Mars again, it's surface is heavily magnetized, and funny enough, from what I read, it's almost like nuclear ordnance went off on its surface. Perhaps this was a warning on why space travel is bad? Or perhaps curiosity might, in other words, kill the rabbit, just yet. If it's a warning, think about it like this, that means a race, perhaps more advanced then even our own, is scared of something much greater...I mean, man made fire, then made guns then the atom bomb and space travel, we learn about how our planets work and gravity, and made hover vehicles in less then 100 years of making the car and wooden battleships, think what other races could of been doing in that time, nomad are good examples, and what if we humans are mere tests to another race?
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Lythrilux - 08-08-2015
Saw this on Reddit. Probably my favourite story from r/writingprompts
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - sindroms - 08-08-2015
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Dove - 08-08-2015
Which world will survive a conflict?
Who will plunder the other's knowledge and resources?
Who will become the other's master?
One thing will lead to another.
There is no other way.
That is, if contact is physically possible.
Probably, contact is as physically impossible as you ramming your head through a 10 meter titanium wall and surviving it.
If it wasnt impossible, we probably wouldnt exist in the form that we do.
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Enkidu - 08-08-2015
(08-08-2015, 10:41 PM)Shizune Wrote: I have theorized over the existence of other life, I came back to a question that I could not answer myself. What if humans are aliens themselves and our gods are really just technologyly advanced humans that escaped our home? Think of it like this, we can't explain many thing that has happened around us, why humans advanced so quickly then any other race that existed before in this solar system. Look at Mars, a few years ago it had no atmosphere, or barely any, and today it can support the advrage dust devil or two. Venus used to be like earth but formed with no fault lines, thus over time she just melted. Look at Mars again, it's surface is heavily magnetized, and funny enough, from what I read, it's almost like nuclear ordnance went off on its surface. Perhaps this was a warning on why space travel is bad? Or perhaps curiosity might, in other words, kill the rabbit, just yet. If it's a warning, think about it like this, that means a race, perhaps more advanced then even our own, is scared of something much greater...I mean, man made fire, then made guns then the atom bomb and space travel, we learn about how our planets work and gravity, and made hover vehicles in less then 100 years of making the car and wooden battleships, think what other races could of been doing in that time, nomad are good examples, and what if we humans are mere tests to another race?
Sorry - Mars used to have a denser atmosphere - it's losing it over time. The reason why we thought it had no atmosphere was because we hadn't sent all that many probes to Mars to test that theory. We do know know that actual, moving glacier networks are everywhere on mars - they're just just buried under a few layers of dust. This means we could colonise mars within our lifetimes.
[/spacenerd]
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Pavel - 08-08-2015
(08-08-2015, 10:40 PM)Johnathan Nox Carter Wrote: it's amazingly well written.
http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html
RE: What if? Contact with another alien civilization - Apollon - 08-08-2015
I don't really believe in aliens.