. . . if you want to contact intex, is it better to use physics or mindscience?
Conundrum Four: Part III: Modern Physicists Send a Message to Intex
On November 16, 1974, the physicist Frank Drake transmitted the very first radio broadcast into space targeting intex on another world. Imagine one morning you received the following message in your inbox from an unknown sender. What do you think it means?
01010011010111001101001101010001010011010111001101001010100010111001101011100110110010101000101001101011100111010010101000101011101001101111011100110100110101000101001101011100110100110101000101001101011100110100101010001011100110101110011011001010100010100110101110011101001010100010100110111101110011010011010100010100110111101110011010011010100010100110101110011010011010100010100110101110011010010101000101110011010111001101100101010001010011010111001110100101010001010011010111001101001101010001010011010111001101001010100010111001101011101100001Perhaps, like most folks, you’d ignore such incomprehensible and unwanted spam. But Physicist Frank assumed that intex aren’t like you and me. He held fast to the conviction that intex are like him: physicists eager for a taxing challenge in the bloodless, unfeeling realms of logic and mathematics.
As a validity check before broadcasting this sacred message into the void, Frank performed some quality control. He submitted his enigmatic string of 0s and 1s to all the other scientists who attended the West Virginia intex conference. Frank wanted to ensure that other human physicists would be able to decipher his code before presenting the puzzle to intex physicists. Most of the human recipients were eminent brainiacs, including physicist Carl Sagan, two winners of the Nobel Prize, and the engineer who founded Hewlett-Packard laboratories. Surely, if we expect intex to understand Frank’s interstellar epistle then some of the smartest scientists on Earth should be able to crack the code.
Physicist Frank presumed both extraterrestrial and terrestrial recipients of his communiqué would recognize that the number of bits in the message (551) was a semiprime number. (What’s a semiprime? I sure didn’t know. Turns out a semiprime is any number that is the product of two primes.) Frank presumed that this would naturally suggest to the recipient that they should re-arrange the string of binary digits into a “bitmap”—a digital picture—with dimensions given by the two prime factors of 551: 19 x 29. He also presumed that the recipients would guess that the picture should be viewed with the vertical sides having 29 pixels. The final entry on this extensive list of assumptions: Frank presumed that when the recipients viewed the resulting picture they would fathom its meaning, much as we might discern the sentiments expressed on a friend’s hastily scribbled postcard from Paris.
If you imagine that Physicist Frank’s 551-bit message is a communication game only a hardcore scientist could love, you’d be wrong. Hardcore scientists couldn’t make heads or tails of Frank’s message. One physicist reported that it appeared to be “a close approximation of the quantum numbers that describe the position of electrons in an iron atom.” No physicist came close to getting it right.
Only one recipient made any progress at deciphering Frank’s message, the Hewlett Packard engineer. He responded by emailing Frank a bitmap of a martini glass. He was the only one who realized that the string of 0s and 1s represented a bitmap—but he failed to reconstruct the intended picture. All he understood was, “You sent me a picture! So here’s an (unrelated) picture back!”
Here’s what Physicist Frank’s bitmap looked like, if someone smarter than human engineers and human physicists ever managed to decode it[1]:
Pretend you somehow decoded all those 0s and 1s and found yourself gazing upon this picture. What do you think it means? If you received this image in your inbox from an unknown sender, how would you react?
This is a valuable exercise, a chance to vicariously experience the thrill of contact: take a moment and imagine you are the first human to gawk at this elaborate pictogram from outer space. What cosmic significance might be hidden within its pixels? Instructions for building a teleportation machine? A map of the galaxy, showing the location of other civilizations? An Encyclopedia Galactica? A detailed account of grand unification theory?
Nope, nothing like that. It’s more like an ultra-autistic Linked In profile. Here are some of the bulletins that Physicist Frank believed he had concealed within his boxy picture:
· The estimated population of the Earth (the number is incorrect).
· The nine planets of our solar system (Dr. Frank, unfortunately, got this number wrong, too).
· The chemical formula for sugar (not sure why this is relevant—do human diplomats ever share the formula for fructose in meet-and-greets with foreign dignitaries?)
· A kindergarten-style stick figure that is supposed to, somehow, be interpreted as a Homo sapiens, and not as a mountain with two waterfalls.
· A (childish) sketch of the radio telescope that Frank intended to use to broadcast the message into space, which is a bit like including an icon for your Samsung Android in a text to a stranger (“Look! I used this device to send you a WhatsApp message!”)
Even though nobody could understand Frank’s message—at all—Frank eventually transmitted his strings of 0s and 1s toward globular star cluster M13 from a radio transmitter in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
So far, there has been no response.
[1] Frank Drake also shared the message in a magazine for amateur codebreakers. One reader ended up partially cracking the code: an electrical engineer in Brooklyn correctly deciphered “most” of the message.