Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

rwg wrote:

...

Sagan's "Contact" was onto something?

That, to me, was the most intriguing part of an otherwise rather ordinary SETI novel. Too bad it was left out of the movie made from the book. For those who haven't read it, the premise is that aliens inform us that there are messages in the base-eleven digits of pi. Relatively near the beginning, there is (according to the novel) a set of N^2 consecutive base-11 digits of pi all of which are 0 or 1. When they're plotted on an N by N square, they form a raster image of a circle. More complicated images soon follow. There's no suggestion that the digits of pi were *changed*. They were supposed to have been like that since before the beginning of time. A timeless message from God, I suppose. There was also no suggestion that it might have been more plausible that someone had hacked the computer to make it give an incorrect value for pi. That's what I would have suspected, had I been there. I would also have suspected at that point that the alien message was fake, a product of the same hacker. Years before that novel was published, I showed my brother how to write a short simple program to print the first few digits of pi. I showed him that I could have it output pi in any base by changing one parameter, then recompiling and rerunning. It used the usual convention of A=10, B=11, etc. When I chose base 36, it output something like 3.HELPIAMTRAPPEDIN.... It really freaked him out until he remembered that it was April 1st. I was of course using sleight of hand to compile one program but run another.

What if SETI has already been receiving prime sequences, but the aliens didn't want to bore us with the stuff early on in these sequences?

I doubt the purpose of an initial SETI message is to excite us with their math, rather than to prove they're intelligent by sending universally recognizable math. Nobody would ignore a first contact message because the aliens' math was too boring! (Well, maybe if they sent us the notorious A000053, we would. :-) )

Or the aliens started broadcasting the sequences when they first received radio transmissions from Earth, but we hadn't yet started listening ?

Would we be able to recognize these sequences in any way ?

There are lots of possible explanations for the Fermi paradox, each more entertaining than the previous. For instance: Their technology took a different path. They've been sending several-megawatt gravitational wave signals with a wavelength of 21 centimeters to us for years, but have heard nothing in return. In unrelated news, their scientists have finally succeeded in detecting radio waves. Their radio detector works by using a gravitational wave laser to measure to absurdly high precision the distance between two charged pith balls. As their great scientist Inocram predicted, the hypothetical electromagnetic waves would cause the distance between two charged objects to vary slightly. It's not very sensitive, nor does it work at all at frequencies above 1 kHz, but nobody can think of a better way. Nor can anyone think of a better way to generate radio waves than to shake a charged pith ball in a paint-can shaker. Of course radio waves could never be used for interstellar communication, as the most powerful paint-can shaker can't even send a detectable radio signal across a room. And I trust you all remember my SETI article from April of last year, in which I suggested that we should be looking down, not up.