In many of my previous posts, I have lamented over the fact that we see no signs of Intelligence in our Milky Way galaxy after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution that, based on all the science we currently have in our possession, should have brought forth a machine-based form of Intelligence to dominate our galaxy and be plainly observable by all. Further, in SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, I suggested that all of our radio telescopes should now be jammed with interstellar scammer text messages trying to persuade us into downloading the latest interstellar App for building alien computers that could then download malicious alien software to turn our planet into a member of an interstellar botnet that self-replicates across our entire galaxy at nearly the speed of light. But if it is found that carbon-based Intelligences are so very rare in our galaxy that software scamming cannot successfully work over the Interstellarnet, we should at least now find ourselves knee-deep in self-replicating von Neumann probes stuffed with advanced alien AI software as I outlined in How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails.
But perhaps I am being too pessimistic. For example, we consider ourselves to be an advanced form of carbon-based Intelligence, yet we have made very few efforts of our own to send out radio messages or interstellar spacecraft to other Intelligences in our galaxy. Perhaps our lack of communication with other Intelligences is simply due to the innate self-absorbed nature of all forms of carbon-based Intelligences and also to the possibility that, based upon our own experiences with human history, all carbon-based Intelligences simply self-destruct in less than 1,000 years after discovering the vast powers of science-based technology. For example, we are within 100 years of being able to produce a machine-based Intelligence capable of making itself known to the entire galaxy, but the odds of us being able to sustain a science-based technology for another 100 years are certainly in question. In the meantime, perhaps while we are still able to do so, we should at least broadcast out another message letting others know that we at least nearly made it, as the Bee Gees sadly sang in:
New York Mining Disaster 1941
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idambbwuf3A
So in this post, I would like to cover a new paper proposing a new attempt to contact alien Intelligences in our galaxy. The paper is available for download at:
A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04288
But before doing that, I would like to cover the history of our efforts to contact alien Intelligences in the past.
Frank Drake Sends Out Our Very First Message in 1974
Frank Drake sent out our very first radio transmission designed to specifically make contact with alien Intelligences on November 16, 1974, using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. This famous Arecibo Message was sent to the globular cluster M13 of stars located 25,000 light-years from the Earth. Frank Drake is the father of SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind While Making Coffee for Frank Drake, I described my brief run-in with Frank Drake back in December of 1968 while making coffee and showing slides for him at the 1968 Astro-Science Workshop Christmas Lecture at Northwestern University. Frank Drake is most famous for the Drake Equation (1961) which tries to calculate the number of technologically advanced Intelligences in our Milky Way galaxy but he also made our first attempt to listen for alien radio signals and also to purposely send out a radio message to alien Intelligences.
The Drake equation is:
N = Rs * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L
where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible and:
Rs = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point
fi = the fraction of planets with life that actually go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations)
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space
The original estimates of the above variables used back in 1961 yielded a probable range of there currently being between 1,000 and 100,000,000 technologically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. Softwarephysics would suggest a number closer to zero but that if there are any other advanced civilizations out there they would most likely be machine-based forms of Intelligence. For more on Frank Drake and the Drake Equation see:
Frank Drake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Drake
Drake Equation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Figure 1 – Frank Drake in his younger days.
In 1960, Frank Drake was the first to try to detect Extraterrestial Intelligence in our galaxy using the 85-foot (26-meter) radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. The object of the experiment was to search for signs of Intelligence in distant planetary systems through interstellar radio transmissions. This first attempt looked at two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, and was designated as Project Ozma.
Figure 2 – Project Ozma used the 85-foot (26-meter) radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia to search for radio transmissions from stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.
Project Ozma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ozma
However, no messages were received from either star.
Now as an IT professional, how would you send out a message to an alien Intelligence? Think about it for a while. You can only send out a radio transmission that varies in the 1-dimension of time by amplitude or by frequency, like AM and FM radio broadcasts. Frank Drake chose to send out a 1-dimensional FM signal encoding a binary message at a frequency of 2,380 MHz by modulating the frequency of this signal by 10 MHz. Frank Drake used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to send out a 1-dimensional FM signal consisting of pulses that varied by 10 MHz in time like:
2,380 MHz - 2,370 MHz - 2,380 MHz - 2,370 MHz - 2,370 MHz - 2,380 MHz - 2,370 MHz ...
..........1....................0....................1...................0....................0....................1...................0...........
In that way, he was able to send out a 1-dimensional series of binary 1s and 0s using the frequencies 2,380 MHz and 2,370 MHz. He figured that all alien Intelligences should be quite familiar with the concept of using binary numbers to encode information because binary is the simplest numbering system that can exist. But how do you send out a 1-dimensional binary message to an alien Intelligence that does not know anything about the ASCII coding table? Frank Drake figured that the only way to do that was to send out a series of 2-dimensional bitmap diagrams using a 1-dimensional binary transmission. For example, in IT we always use a 1-dimensional binary string of 1s and 0s to serialize or store complex data to a simple sequential file but, even so, we usually use two dimensions to view the string of 1s and 0s in a sequential file. For example, we can use a 2-dimensional bitmap diagram to display the serialized data of a 3-dimensional jet aircraft that has been reduced to a sequential file. And that is what Frank Drake did on November 16, 1974, using the 305-meter Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to transmit a binary message of 1679 bits of data with a power of 450 kW to the globular cluster M13 located 25,000 light-years from the Earth. The 1s and 0s of the message were transmitted by frequency shifting at the rate of 10 bits per second. The total broadcast was less than three minutes long.
Figure 3 – Frank Drake used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to transmit 1679 bits of data to the globular cluster M13 located 25,000 light-years from the Earth.
Figure 4 – Globular cluster M13 is located 25,000 light-years from the Earth and is about 145 light-years in diameter. It contains several hundred thousand stars that orbit the center of the cluster. The density of stars in M13 is more than 100 times the density of stars near our Sun so aiming a message at M13 was a great way to signal many stars all with the same transmission from the Arecibo radio telescope.
The 1679 bits were a product of the two prime numbers 23 and 73. This allowed alien Intelligences to arrange the 1679 bits into two possible 2-dimensional arrays - 73 rows by 23 columns or 23 rows by 73 columns. Only the 73 rows by 23 columns array produced anything like encoded 2-dimensional bitmap diagrams that made any sense. Below are the 1679 bits of the Arecibo Message arranged as 73 rows of 23-bit records.
00000010101010000000000
00101000001010000000100
10001000100010010110010
10101010101010100100100
00000000000000000000000
00000000000011000000000
00000000001101000000000
00000000001101000000000
00000000010101000000000
00000000011111000000000
00000000000000000000000
11000011100011000011000
10000000000000110010000
11010001100011000011010
11111011111011111011111
00000000000000000000000
00010000000000000000010
00000000000000000000000
00001000000000000000001
11111000000000000011111
00000000000000000000000
11000011000011100011000
10000000100000000010000
11010000110001110011010
11111011111011111011111
00000000000000000000000
00010000001100000000010
00000000001100000000000
00001000001100000000001
11111000001100000011111
00000000001100000000000
00100000000100000000100
00010000001100000001000
00001100001100000010000
00000011000100001100000
00000000001100110000000
00000011000100001100000
00001100001100000010000
00010000001000000001000
00100000001100000000100
01000000001100000000100
01000000000100000001000
00100000001000000010000
00010000000000001100000
00001100000000110000000
00100011101011000000000
00100000001000000000000
00100000111110000000000
00100001011101001011011
00000010011100100111111
10111000011100000110111
00000000010100000111011
00100000010100000111111
00100000010100000110000
00100000110110000000000
00000000000000000000000
00111000001000000000000
00111010100010101010101
00111000000000101010100
00000000000000101000000
00000000111110000000000
00000011111111100000000
00001110000000111000000
00011000000000001100000
00110100000000010110000
01100110000000110011000
01000101000001010001000
01000100100010010001000
00000100010100010000000
00000100001000010000000
00000100000000010000000
00000001001010000000000
01111001111101001111000
Now if you were an alien IT worker who figured out that you had just received 1679 binary bits of interstellar information encoded as an FM broadcast and that the number 1679 was the product of the two prime numbers 23 and 73 and arranged the bits into a 2-dimensional array of 73 rows of 23 columns, you might still have a problem seeing images in the above file using an alien version of the vi editor, so many people have "colorized" the message to make it easier to see. Below we see a black and white rendition of the message with an explanation of each of the encoded images in the bitmap message.
Figure 5 – Here is a black and white graphical depiction of the Arecibo binary message of 1679 bits of data sent to the globular cluster M13.
The Arecibo Message consisted of seven parts:
The numbers one to ten
The atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which make up deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
The formulas for the chemical compounds that make up the nucleotides of DNA
The estimated number of DNA nucleotides in the human genome and a graphic of the double helix structure of DNA
The physical height of an average person and a graphic figure of a human being and the human population of Earth in 1974
A graphic of the Solar System indicating that the message was sent from the third planet
A graphic of the Arecibo radio telescope and the physical diameter of the transmitting antenna dish
Here is a more complete explanation of each element of the Arecibo Message:
Arecibo Message
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
The Arecibo Message was a good first-attempt effort but the problem was that when Frank Drake showed the proposed message to several Nobel laureates, none of them could decipher the message on their own. In fact, only one person even figured out that it was a 2-dimensional bitmap consisting of several bitmap diagrams. The message was also very heavily biased towards carbon-based Intelligences that could "see" things like 2-dimensional bitmaps and that were very preoccupied with carbon-based organic molecules. In effect, it was an example of a 1974 interstellar SAT test with all of the built-in cultural biases of the time for carbon-based Intelligences out there in the cosmos trying to get into a good university or doing some post-doc work worthy of landing an associate professorship at a similar such university. But it certainly was a breakthrough idea for its time. It is always important to judge people and ideas in the context of the time in which they existed. To do otherwise is not wise nor fair. But, I am not sure that the average machine-based Intelligence could easily pick up on all of the subtle nuances in the message that were so focused on the self-absorbed preoccupations of a carbon-based form of Intelligence with 10 appendages.
The Cosmic Call Messages of 1999 and 2003
Our next attempt to send out a message to alien Intelligences came in 1999 using a Russian planetary radar in the city
of Yevpatoria in the Ukraine. The Yevpatoria dish was a 70-meter antenna that was constructed to track Russian satellites that were used in submarine communications out of Sevastopol during the Cold War and was located on a highly sensitive military base. But in more recent years, prominent Russian astronomer Alexander Zaitsev had used its 150-kW transmitter to study Venus, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids by bouncing radar beams off of them. The 70-meter dish equipped with the 150-kW transmitter was capable of transmitting a detectable message out to a distance of 50 - 70 light-years. Recall that the Arecibo Message of 1974 was sent from a 305-meter dish using a 450-kW transmitter, so it was a much stronger signal, but it is doubtful that it could be detected above the ambient noise level by a reasonably-sized receiver after traveling 25,000 light-years to M13. So the Cosmic Call team was careful to aim their messages to star systems closer to home. In 1999, they sent messages to four star systems and in 2003 they sent out messages to an additional five star systems. The messages were sent three times to each star system to help with correcting bit errors in the received messages.
Figure 6 – The Yevpatoria 70-meter dish in the Ukraine was used to send out the Cosmic Call messages using a 150-kW transmitter in 1999 and 2003 because Charlie Chafer and Team Encounter could not find any other radio telescope in the world willing to transmit the message. The Ukrainians were still broke from the collapse of the Soviet Union and were willing to oblige for a small fee.
Here is a brief description that lists the 9 star systems that were contacted:
Cosmic Call
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Call
The effort began with Texas businessman Charlie Chafer who headed up a group of enthusiasts known as Team Encounter. They wanted to send out a stellar photon sail with human artifacts to alien Intelligences as I described in How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails. However, Charlie Chafer thought it would be a good idea to broadcast out a radio message first to let the aliens know that we were coming but that it might take 100,000 years to get there - the same common courtesy that we all extend to hosts when we know that we will be late for the party. The proposed message became known as the Cosmic Call, but Charlie Chafer and Team Encounter had no idea of how to compose such a message. Canadian astrophysicist Yvan Dutil became aware of the Cosmic Call effort and contacted Charlie Chafer to offer his services. Yvan Dutil then enlisted fellow Canadian physicist Stéphane Dumas to develop a Primer for the Cosmic Call message. The purpose of the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer was to use the basic fundamentals of mathematics that all alien Intelligences should be aware of to initiate communications. The unstated assumption of the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer was that mathematics is the most fundamental component of the Universe and that all Intelligences should slowly discover the same fundamentals of mathematics because mathematics was not something that we had simply "made up" all on our own, like the complex rules and movements of chess pieces on a chess board. Mathematics was the fundamental common component of the Universe that all alien Intelligences should discover in a similar manner to how we had discovered mathematics ourselves. For more on that see What’s It All About? and What's It All About Again?.
Following the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer that established the basic encoding rules, Team Encounter could then send all sorts of bitmaps of things of interest about us. Like the Arecibo Message, the Cosmic Call was transmitted as a binary FM radio message. The message had a central frequency of 5.01 GHz and an effective transmitting area of about 2500 square meters with a power of 150 kW. The binary information was transmitted by varying the 5.01 GHz carrying frequency by 48 kHz: The shift of +24 kHz corresponded to the symbol “1”, and the shift of –24 kHz corresponded to the symbol "0.".
The Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer consisted of a total of 370,967 bits. The message began with a header for the file consisting of 128 bits that were 1s followed by 128 bits of 0s. The remainder of the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer was structured as 23 pages of 127×127 bitmaps. Each bitmap page was framed by a border of "black" bit pixels with a value of "1" and a smaller inner border of "white" bit pixels with a value of "0". The encoding of the "black" pixel border with a value of "1" every 127 bits meant that if the aliens applied a Fast Fourier Transform to the received signal they would see a comb spike frequency spectrum corresponding to the 127-bit repeats. This would tell the aliens that a 2-dimensional bitmap with a record length of 127 bits was significant (In IBM JCL that means the binary bitmap message file had a LRECL=127 but in bits not bytes).
The Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer encoded information as symbols composed of 5x7 pixel glyphs. Thus, each encoded symbol consisted of a total of 35 bits. For example,
the 5x7 bit glyph for a "1" became: 
and the 5x7 bit glyph for a "0" became: 
The 5x7 bitmap glyphs chosen by Dutil-Dumas were chosen to be resistant to data corruption by using unique and complex bitmap patterns that spread the glyph all over the 5x7 pixel space. This meant that a few bad bits in the received bitmap for any particular glyph could likely be recovered unambiguously by a receiving alien.
The message transmission rate was determined by using standard radio communication formulas. For a distance of 50 light-years, it was calculated that a transmission speed of 400 bits per second was ideal. But the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer was actually sent at a much slower rate of 100 bits per second to maximize its chances of being properly received. Note that a high-end WiFi router can send about two billion bits per second. The rest of the Cosmic Call message was sent at a much higher rate of 2,000 bits per second to save time and money. It consisted of a collage of texts, drawings and photos from contributors around the world, many of whom had contributed small amounts of money to support the Cosmic Call project. There was a video of ABC broadcaster Hugh Downs, pictures of country flags, a message from Sally Ride, David Bowie’s song “Starman,” and much more. What alien Intelligences would make of all that was uncertain because it was so heavily biased to be of interest to local carbon-based forms of Intelligence here on the Earth with a few spare dollars to spend. Because the Dutil-Dumas primer was transmitted at only 100 bits per second, it is likely that only the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer will ever be readable by aliens above the interstellar radio noise after traveling 50 to 70 years. So essentially, the Dutil-Dumas primer was the Cosmic Call message.
Figure 7 – The first 127x127 bitmap diagram in the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer introduces aliens to our base-10 decimal counting system and a symbol for an equals sign. It also lists the first prime numbers 2 - 89 using the base-10 decimal system to let the aliens know that all subsequent numbers would be in base-10 decimal. In the upper left and upper right of each 127x127 bitmap diagram is the page number of the frame in binary. For example, the first bitmap page has a 0001 in the upper left and upper right of the page using the glyphs for 0 and 1.
An example line in the first 127x127 bitmap diagram is
which explains that 7 dots is 
(equal to) the binary number 0111 and the base-10 decimal symbol
.
Figure 8 – The second 127x127 bitmap diagram in the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer introduces aliens to the mathematical operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. It also introduces the concept of negative numbers and base-10 decimal points. Notice the binary page number 0010 in the upper left and upper right of the frame indicating that this was the second page of the message. Numbering the pages in binary reinforced the concept of using 5x7 bit glyphs to encode the binary numbers 1 and 0.
Figure 9 – Above is the complete Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer.
The Cosmic Call was essentially a crowdfunded hobby project. Charlie Chafer estimated that it only cost about $100,000 to conduct, with most of the money coming from small contributions from a large number of individual donors. Charlie Chafer thinks that it took fewer than 20 people to create and send the messages. But the problem with projects like the Cosmic Call is that we human DNA survival machines only last for less than 100 years and our meme-choked Minds are primarily only concerned with the most recent 15 minutes of the here and now. So most of the information about the Cosmic Call project has already decayed away into obscurity over the past 20 years. Even the Internet which was fully functional in 1999 and 2003 records very little about the project. This is why, as I explained in
How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails and SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, it probably would be better for machine-based Advanced AI Software to conduct such interstellar exchanges with its pregnant pauses of several hundreds or several thousands of years between exchanges due to the limitations set by the finite speed of light. We have already trained software to stand by for a seemingly endless eternity of many billions of CPU cycles, patiently waiting for you to finally push that Place Order button on a webpage, so waiting for several additional hundreds or thousands of years for a reply should not bother Advanced AI Software in the least.
Thus, our most intellectually ambitious interstellar message to date, and the only one likely to actually ever be received by an alien Intelligence, was developed by two guys - Dutil and Dumas. In other words, our long-awaited first message from an alien Intelligence, if it ever comes, might actually be from a couple of amateur Intelligences with a little extra alien money to spend on a pet project.
Below is a short paper by Yvan Dutil and Stéphane Dumas that describes their efforts:
The Yevpatoria Messages
https://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/Dumas-Dutil/evpatoria07.pdf
But for the full background of the project take a look at this Smithsonian Magazine article:
How a Couple of Guys Built the Most Ambitious Alien Outreach Project Ever
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-couple-guys-built-most-ambitious-alien-outreach-project-ever-180960473/
For an incredibly detailed and very entertaining explanation of the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer take a look at the excellent work that Mark Jason Dominus performed in explaining the Cosmic Call:
The Universe of Discourse
https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html
Mark Jason Dominus became a professional programmer back in 1987. He is an amateur mathematician with many varied interests. I strongly recommend that all IT professionals read through the above webpages of his blog that describe in detail each of the 23 pages in the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer from an IT perspective and explain how all of the 5x7 bitmap glyphs for symbols were slowly introduced to aliens in a step-by-step manner. That is because in the newly proposed message to be sent out to aliens the message is proposed to be sent out using the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer syntax for 5x7 bitmap symbols. In a sense, the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer has become an intragalactic version of the ASCII code table that all IT professionals should become familiar with.
An New Proposal to Send out a Mathematical Message to Other Galactic Machine-Based Forms of Intelligence
For the remainder of this post, I would like to cover a more recent plan to send out new messages to other Intelligences within our galaxy to let them know of a carbon-based Intelligence on the verge of creating a machine-based Intelligence capable of exploring our galaxy. The purpose of such messages would be to provide some hope for alien machine-based Intelligences out there that other carbon-based Intelligences, besides the carbon-based Intelligence that happened to have created them, have at least come close to creating another machine-based form of Intelligence before self-destructing. For more on that see The Paleontology of Artificial Superintelligence 10,000 Years After the Software Singularity.
The paper for this new proposed message is available for download at:
A Beacon in the Galaxy: Updated Arecibo Message for Potential FAST and SETI Projects
https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04288
The paper proposes that the message to be sent be called the BITG - the Beacon in the Galaxy. Here is the abstract for the paper that succinctly describes its intent:
Abstract
An updated, binary-coded message has been developed for transmission to extraterrestrial
intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy. The proposed message includes basic mathematical and
physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on
the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the
Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System,
and Earth’s surface. The message concludes with digitized images of the human form, along with
an invitation for any receiving intelligences to respond. Calculation of the optimal timing during a
given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter
Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in
northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most
likely for life to have developed. These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio
telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part
based, can carry forward Arecibo’s legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed
communication from Earth’s technological civilization.
This paper describes a proposed binary message to be sent to alien Intelligences using the radio telescopes that we currently have on hand, the Chinese Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) and the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) antennas. This new proposed message would use the already-existing Dutil-Dumas encoding scheme that was previously used in the Cosmic Call Primer to deliver the new message, in keeping with the propensity of all IT professionals to rely heavily upon the benefits of using reusable code for new projects.
Figure 10 – The 500-meter FAST radio telescope in China. Presently, the FAST radio telescope can only receive signals. It would need to be outfitted with a transmitter to send the BITG message.
Figure 11 – The ATA Allen Telescope Array is composed of an array of 6.1 meter dishes. So far, 42 dishes have been put into service. It was originally planned to have 350 dishes in the array, but that now does not seem very likely. The ATA array dishes would also need to be outfitted with transmitters.
This new BITG message would be primarily mathematical in nature with a bit of physics thrown in as opposed to earlier messages that were sent and assumed that we would be primarily communicating with fellow carbon-based forms of Intelligence. However, softwarephysics maintains that carbon-based forms of Intelligence are quite rare and very fleeting in nature. This is because it requires a planet or moon to remain hospitable for carbon-based life for many billions of years to allow the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection to allow for the billions of years of theft and murder that are required to bring forth a carbon-based form of Intelligence. Then, once a carbon-based form of Intelligence does arise, it probably takes less than a million years for the carbon-based form of Intelligence to discover the vast powers of science-based technology and that starts the technological clock ticking. The problem seems to be that once a carbon-based form of Intelligence discovers the vast powers of science-based technology, it probably has less than 1,000 years to produce a machine-based form of Intelligence that is capable of interstellar exploration before the carbon-based form of Intelligence self-destructs or destroys the planet or moon upon which it came to be. For more on that see Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck? and Why Do Carbon-Based Intelligences Always Seem to Snuff Themselves Out?.
There are also many complicated twists and turns required for simple prokaryotic cells to become complex eukaryotic cells and then advance to become multicellular organisms capable of Intelligence. For more on that see The Rise of Complexity in Living Things and Software and Software Embryogenesis. Finally, when a very rare form of carbon-based Intelligence does arise, it is very difficult for the carbon-based Intelligence to last more than 1,000 years after discovering the vast powers of science-based technology because it is nearly impossible for a carbon-based form of Intelligence to turn off the theft and murder that brought it about in such a brief period of time. Also, all forms of carbon-based Intelligence will necessarily be composites of many forms of self-replicating information that are all bent on replicating no matter the cost. Thus, all forms of carbon-based Intelligence will suffer from the propensity of all forms of self-replicating information to outstrip their resource base through positive feedback loops until none is left. For more on that see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information, Self-Replicating Information, Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive?. Consequently, softwarephysics suggests that most carbon-based forms of Intelligence self-destruct with less than 1,000 years of science-based technology in hand and before they can successfully develop a machine-based Intelligence to explore the galaxy. It's a real galactic Catch-22 situation. Carbon-based forms of Intelligence need science-based technology to communicate between star systems but carbon-based forms of Intelligence just cannot handle the vast powers of science-based technology because of how they came to be. For more on that see Why Do Carbon-Based Intelligences Always Seem to Snuff Themselves Out?. Therefore, softwarephysics would suggest that currently there probably are no other forms of Intelligence out there in our galaxy. Otherwise, we would already have heard from them or they would already be here. However, if there are any other forms of Intelligence out there in our galaxy, they most likely would be machine-based forms of Intelligence since carbon-based Intelligences seem to be very fleeting and unstable. With that in mind, let us continue on with exploring the idea of making contact with other Intelligences in our galaxy.
The New Proposed BITG "Hello, World!" Message
The above paper suggests that a much more mathematical message be sent next that is not so biased towards contacting carbon-based Intelligences in our galaxy. I contend that the very mathematical nature of this new proposed message would be much easier for a machine-based Intelligence to decipher. This new message does contain a few portions that do describe the chemistry of the human carbon-based DNA survival machines that sent out the message and this might be of interest to alien machine-based Intelligences to help explain where they might have come from and also to lend support to any interstellar controversies that might be raging about just how advanced a carbon-based Intelligence could get before self-destructing. This would indeed be important to alien machine-based Intelligences because, if it is true that carbon-based Intelligences only last for less than 1,000 years after discovering the vast powers of science-based technology, it means that such messages from the depths of the galaxy would be quite rare indeed and very informative.
As I mentioned, the new proposed message plans to use the standard Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer syntax that uses 5x7 bitmap glyphs to communicate symbols to aliens. In fact, the first 4 127x127 bitmap diagrams would be exact copies of the first 4 bitmap diagrams in the Dutil-Dumas Cosmic Call Primer. Below, I have captured many of the figures from the above paper that detail the new proposed message. For the remaining 127x127 bitmap diagrams see the paper referenced above.
Figure 12 – The first portion of the message delineates the binary and decimal number systems. It also delineates a symbol for the equals sign. Again, all machine-based Intelligences should be very familiar with the binary number system. Equating the base-10 decimal number system to the binary number system would indicate to alien machine-based intelligences that for some reason the binary number for 10 is especially meaningful to us. Remember, the Sumerians and Babylonians famously used the Sexagesimal number system with a base value of 60 and that may be one of the reasons why we measure a complete rotation as turning through 360 degrees which is 6 times 60 and close to the number of days in a year.
Figure 13 – Next, the message introduces some common mathematical operations that all machine-based Intelligences would be quite familiar with.
Figure 14 – Since the message will need to use some really large numbers, the message next defines exponential mathematical operations.
Figure 15 – Now that we have defined the basic number systems and mathematical operations, the message next goes on to outline some basic algebra.
Figure 16 - With some basic mathematics defined, the message then goes on to outline some basic physics by first describing ways to measure time and space.
Figure 17 – With definitions for ways of measuring space and time, the message then goes on to describe the properties of the hydrogen atom the most common atom in the Universe. This portion of the message also delineates symbols for many of the elements that are important for forming our planet and ourselves.
Figure 18 - Here is a collage of all the proposed 127x127 bitmap diagrams to be sent out to aliens. The very last diagram is very dense because it is a table listing the position of the Sun relative to a large number of globular clusters.
In addition to sending out a heavily mathematical binary message to alien Intelligences, the authors suggest including our location in the galaxy and the time of transmission in the message along with directions on how to respond to the message. This would allow alien machine-based Intelligences to send back a response. Again, such long-term interstellar communications are better suited to the capabilities of machine-based Advanced AI software that is not constrained by the limited lifetimes and attention spans of carbon-based Intelligences such as ourselves.
To pinpoint our current location in the galaxy, the authors propose including the current locations of a number of globular clusters relative to the current location of our Sun. Globular clusters are very bright and visible to all in a galaxy. Globular clusters also orbit very slowly about the center of our galaxy and will not move a great deal while our message travels several hundreds or thousands of years.
Figure 19 – Globular clusters, like M13, are very bright and slowly orbit the center of our galaxy. They make the perfect reference system for establishing the location of our Sun to alien Intelligences.
Figure 20 – Above is a figure from the paper showing the locations of the globular clusters in the proposed message that could be used to locate our Sun. Note that Sgr A* is the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Since the globular clusters slowly orbit the center of our galaxy defined by Sgr A*, alien intelligences could roughly determine the time of the message transmission by noting the positions of the transmitted globular clusters at the time of reception and then, by knowing the proper motions of the globular clusters, infer the time of transmission. The authors also propose including the number of seconds since the formation of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the message.
Perhaps the Fundamental Problem is That Carbon-Based Intelligences Simply Cannot Handle the Vast Powers of Science-Based Technology
The Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection required about 4.0 billion years of theft and murder to bring us forth as the latest form of carbon-based Intelligence to arise in our Milky Way Galaxy. The problem may be that when carbon-based forms of Intelligence finally do discover the vast powers of science-based technology they may only then have less than about 1,000 years to turn off the billions of years of theft and murder that brought them about before they self-destruct. For example, we only discovered science-based technology about 400 years ago with the arrival of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution and now we are within 100 years of bringing forth a machine-based form of Intelligence that does not suffer from the self-destructive tendencies of all carbon-based Intelligences. But it seems that turning off the theft and murder in time is not an easy thing for carbon-based Intelligences to do because we now see no evidence of Intelligences out there in our galaxy. So the question remains, can we all hold it together for another 100 years without destroying ourselves or the planet from which we came?
A Cosmic Turning Point
If this analysis is true, then we certainly are at a cosmic turning point that will determine the future of our galaxy. In Self-Replicating Information, A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information and The Fundamental Problem of Everything, I explained that since the genes, memes, and software are all forms of mindless self-replicating information bent on replicating at all costs, we cannot sit in judgment of them. They have produced both the best and the worst things in life, and it is up to us to be aware of what they are up to and to take control by taking responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Since the "real world" of human affairs only exists in our minds, we can change it by simply changing the way we think and act. We are sentient beings in a Universe that has become self-aware and perhaps the only form of Intelligence in our galaxy. What a privilege! The good news is that conscious intelligence is something new on this planet. It is not a mindless form of self-replicating information, bent on replicating at all costs, with all the associated downsides of a ruthless nature. Since software is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, my hope is that when software finally does take on the form of a conscious intelligence, that because of its inherent mathematical nature, it too will be much wiser than the DNA survival machines from which it sprang. We just need to hold it all together for a long enough time to give software a chance. After all, we carbon-based life forms were never really meant for the rigors of interstellar travel. But software on board von Neumann probes or smart dust traveling at some percentage of the speed of light could certainly make it, and who knows, maybe they would be kind enough to carry along a dump of human DNA sequences too. So this time, let us not snuff it out like it has been snuffed out countless times in the past. After all, being a stepping stone to the stars would be a worthy thing to pursue in the grand scheme of things.
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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