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aylmao a day ago

Unsure what the tone of this message is, so I don't know if you're aware, but that's included too:

> Behind the figures of the human beings, the silhouette of the Pioneer spacecraft is shown in the same scale so that the size of the human beings can be deduced by measuring the spacecraft.

It's good to have redundancy, not just so someone interpreting the plaque can confirm their hypothesis, but also in case one of the messages fail. In this case, the spacecraft could break, but we can assume quantum transitions will always be observable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

arghwhat a day ago | parent [-]

I sarcastically referenced the plaque itself, which is a convenient disc of a known size to anyone observing the drawing, unlike the space craft or physics riddles.

Using quantum transitions is quite ridiculous in my opinion due to requiring not only the observer to have a perfectly compatible understanding of physics (even a more advanced understanding might not be compatible - maybe they don't categorize elements by electrons, or even treat elemental particles as a quantifiable entity), combined with the sheer number of deductions required to understand what was meant with two circles and a few lines.

I doubt we would ever have decoded this had we been the recipient rather than author, and that's with a perfectly compatible understanding of physics.

mquander 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If we picked up that plaque from space with an illustration of some aliens and an alien solar system and someone Tweeted it, the correct hypothesis for the numbering would develop plurality consensus within one hour.

I don't know if aliens would decode it but it's not right that humans wouldn't decode it.

adonovan 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I highly doubt it, but it might deliver some memorable zingers about nude aliens.

arghwhat 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not to mention that several dozen new cults formed around the plaque.

bigiain 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And probably complaints about "wokeness" from the Galactic Twitter owner because it used a woman as the size reference...

:sigh:

I hope I never live to see Galactic Twitter.

petsfed a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I submit that if the concept of quantum transitions is alien to whatever recipient of that probe (if ever), then any attempts to communicate are hopeless anyway. That is, if the recipient's physical reality is so different from our own that they can't at least get back to "oh, this distance means that transition, now the rest of the plaque makes sense", then no asynchronous communication will bridge that gap.

arghwhat 21 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no relation between the ability to communicate and a shared understanding of our concept of quantum transitions - case in point, our invention of the technology we use to communicate with deep space far predates us learning these concepts ourselves.

I'd also hold that the only thing this plaque could ever give is clear sign of artificial creation, and by virtue the (possibly past) existence of some entity capable of creating it. Maybe they'll get a vague idea of what we look like, but if "their" culture does not commonly depict themselves in 2D as we do, or "they" have vastly different morphologies, even that would be unclear. The context needed to understand our attempt at showing our location might also be lost if the thing went far enough.

fc417fc802 19 hours ago | parent [-]

> our invention of the technology we use to communicate with deep space far predates us learning these concepts ourselves.

Maxwell published in 1873. The double slit experiment was 1803, subatomic theory developed throughout the 1800s, and Planck proposed quanta in 1900. The first radio transmission across the Atlantic came approximately 2 years after Planck's theory.

I doubt it is plausible to develop anything resembling industrial technology without stumbling across certain fundamental truths in the process because doing so requires a sufficiently accurate model of physics.

arghwhat 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The period you're describing is that of old quantum theory, which was hugely inconsistent and predates our theories of modern quantum mechanics which is post 1925 or so.

The inventor of the arc converter was 18 at the time radio waves were discovered, 34 at the time he invented the arc converter, but 56 and with only 17 years left till his death when the era of modern quantum mechanics started with the invention of wave mechanics. It's a lifetime apart.

Some discoveries were made during that period that are of course still relevant.

arghwhat 6 hours ago | parent [-]

(Not to mention that the hydrogen line was only discovered in 1951, as a result of years of hearing it using radio equipment invented half a century prior. Even things as basic as the proton took until 1932 to discover.)

spullara a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you think that physics is somehow subjective? We absolutely would have decoded the message.

wongarsu 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Physics is a model of reality. Reality is objective, but the model we have chosen is very much "subjective" (maybe arbitrary is a better term).

It's easy to imagine that another species might have never conceptualized electrons as little balls orbiting around a nucleus. They are neither balls nor are they flying in circles, those are simply abstractions we like because they appeal to the way we perceive reality. The way we conceptualize electrons leads to issues like the wave-particle duality, so it's likely just a local optimum we got stuck in. Another species might not even think of Electrons as being distinct entities, maybe they think of the electron field as one large ocean with some waves in it, or they subscribe to the single electron theory, or something we have never thought of and might never imagine from our perspective.

mannykannot 17 hours ago | parent [-]

"Arbitrary" ("existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will", "based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something" [1]) is a very poor term. Not only is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe, it is also capable of demonstrating (when it is actually the case) equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation. It is not perfect, but can you present anything that does better?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arbitrary

freehorse 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe

It is also very highly constrained by how _we_ observe the universe. Beings with different sensory/cognitive capacities could develop very different models.

> equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation

If there was some mathematical equivalence between their models and ours, which is already a leap to assume, there is still a question about whether the specific measure used would be translated to something equivalent to our object length measure in their model, which gets much stronger than just some equivalence assumption. And it’s even stronger to assume that this equivalence could just be inferred without any other information apart from the disk.

mannykannot 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It seems disproportionate to fuss about "a leap to assume..." when we are talking about a small plaque affixed to a probe on the highly speculative basis that something intelligent might one day retrieve it, as opposed to something that is mission-critical. Would we be better off for not making these "leaps"?

freehorse 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I was answering to a specific comment chain.

mannykannot an hour ago | parent [-]

It would be a leap to assume another culture has something similar to (or, in some cases, anything resembling) one's ethics, sense of humor or taste in music. In comparison to these things, science has something they do not: apparently universal and impersonal 'laws', which, where we can check, appear to hold across the visible universe (putting aside some unresolved issues on the leading edge of our present knowledge.)

For some extra-solar civilization to examine the probe and its plaque intact, it will have to rendezvous with it in space. It seems to me to be the greater leap of faith to suppose this can be done without having knowledge that is isomorphic or equivalent to our formulation of orbital mechanics. Do you have any concrete ideas about how this might be so?

monadINtop 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a theoretical physicist, yes physics could definitely be subjective between different species. Physics is the way HUMANS describe nature to themselves. I don't doubt that it describes some greater nature outside of us that is invariant, but it is only a description - not the thing itself. Like mathematics it is an anthropocentric conceptualization that has many arbitrary and historically contingent choices in its choice of representation and its chosen objects of study.

How could we ever be certain than another intelligence (whatever that means) would be capable of understanding the intended message? Unless of course we are already starting off with the major assumption that the only things that can be intelligent are things like us. I'm not even sure that intelligent has any meaning aside from denoting behavior "similar to us".

spullara 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If they could discover the probe at all and view the plaque, lots of things are already very similar.

monadINtop 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

Yeah perhaps, but its really hard to say anything concrete either way

cuttothechase a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Our understanding evolves, course corrects, spins off etc., we can use some static value as purported from the dark ages or by newtonian or later einstenian points of view. They all are measurably correct for the problems that they are trying to solve for the people who lived during those times. A million years from now would these values still be relevant or be considered as having the same value of importance or will they be replaced by even more finer and precise and contextually different values that could be more precise and more accurate etc.,

arghwhat 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed. Say, maybe a civilization didn't start out with trying to build the world of particles of progressively finer size, but started directly with a model of fields, waves and charges and therefore never had a concept of a discrete elemental particle, and in turn a system built around that to categorize elements.

Or to them, an atom is as large an arbitrary macro structure as proteins are to us, and so they would never consider two empty circles with a single line to represent something so big and chaotic. Or maybe they had the crazy idea of building everything of vibrating strings!

Who knows what the abstractions and approximations would be when the foundation of it all isn't "getting hit on the head by an apple".

21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
jdhwosnhw 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The 21 cm line was chosen specifically because it’s the brightest line in the radio regime in our galaxy. Any civilization in the Milky Way capable of developing electromagnetic sensors would see that emission. There is a game theoretic component to this, as these other civilizations would also know that we could also see that line, and thus understand its importance

arghwhat 9 hours ago | parent [-]

The prevalence of the 21 cm wavelength is something they would likely discover should they be in a part of the universe similar to ours. What I find laughable is the means of trying to communicate this wavelength and using it as a means to indicate our size.

Now if you go the other way, referenced 21 cm as a well known quantity (say, by making the plaque 21cm wide and referencing its diameter) and used that to describe the hydrogen spin flip in order to teach or communicate our level of physics understanding rather than depend on a shared understanding, then I'd say it makes more sense.

m4rtink 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record.

Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)

lodovic 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really wonder how future archaelogists are ever going to decode our timeline. Imagine a meteor strikes, civilization falls apart, and in 20,000 years they dig up a data centre. Even if they get the computers to work and the hard drives are still readable, everything will be encrypted.

cuttothechase 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What if extraterrestrial "intelligence" didn't have a reason to "evolve" functional equivalents of a visual cortex. Even on earth where having vision gives a distinct evolutionary advantage over non-vision based living forms, species without vision far outnumber those with vision.

arghwhat 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Making the data fault tolerant to the discovery by another civilization, its collapse and later rediscovery by another civilization seems a bit of a stretch goal. :)

fc417fc802 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Compared to a cold object being detected and then picked up from somewhere out in deep space?

arghwhat 10 hours ago | parent [-]

That's the "discovery by another civilization" part, so yes.

mannykannot 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It was always a very long shot, regardless of who might be the recipients. Would we have been better off if it had not been done?