Talk:Hello from Earth

Neutrality

The original author appears to have a very negative view of the idea of sending this message in the first place, but he(?) doesn't really provide solid evidence backing that view. I have no sources to indicate otherwise, but the arguments made don't seem to hold much water. For one example, see "Explanation of removal" below. 72.213.33.4 (talk) 16:22, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Explanation of removal

"but nobody explained why he hope that such "encoded and packaged" text will be understandable and conceived by probable Extra-Terrestrials."

Any non-random transmission will be assumed to be artificial, so the message "we are here" is part of any "non-random" transmission. The actual decoding may take centuries (or mere moments, depending on the power of hypothetical alien computers). 99.236.221.124 (talk) 05:44, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

For example, when I read an article Arecibo Message, I can find there such "explanation". But I can not find any explanation about method of encoding, bit rate, formats, etc for this, "Hello From Earth" message. METIfan (talk) 04:55, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Not to mention, how do you decode a linguistic message when you hardly have any context? Even when we wanted to decode ancient Egyptian we needed a Rosetta Stone to help us, and those were pictographs, and we already had so much context to help us. We know, for example, where they lived, how they lived, we could physically look at and touch their old tombs and many other buildings/living areas, they were the same species, had some shared culture/history, etc. What would the recipients know about us? What would we have in common? Probably we would recognize similar basic patterns/shapes, and live on a planet, and rely on liquid water and be carbon-based, and have some concept of basic math, and those are still only "probably's". Why are we relying on extraterrestrials having some magical ability to read our minds when there's a good chance we may have even less common ground than a lanternfish and an acacia tree?

The issue with "brute forcing" such a problem with powerful computers is that we already know that, without any language rules to start from, a piece of text can be interpreted in a near infinite number of ways that are internally-consistent. There is no way of knowing which was the "true", originally-intended message. Computer programmers will sometimes, for fun, write a program in an existing language (like C) that implements an interpreter for a new made-up language (call it E, since D is taken), and set the rules for the new language such that the interpreter source code can be run through itself to produce an E program that does something interesting. And this is still sticking to a lot of rules about basic language structure. Yeah the aliens will get "we are here", but don't count on them getting anything else if all we send them is text, especially if the text is sent in multiple languages (are we trying to make this as hard as possible or what?). Even if they think they've decoded it they may end up with something else entirely. The Arecibo message isn't perfect either but I can reasonably believe that an ET capable of receiving the message would be capable of figuring out at least some of it (the Solar System is pretty easy to spot, especially if they know what our SS looks like and can tell what direction the message came from). From there they'd have a handhold (or, uh, whatever) to at least have a fighting chance at the rest. Was there a handhold, or a primer, included in the Hello From Earth transmission? Or was it just an opaque mess sent out to some poor aliens who won't even know where to start? --142.25.98.192 (talk) 19:55, 18 November 2011 (UTC)