Can you decode this ALIEN MESSAGE?
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- čas přidán 2. 05. 2024
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Chapters
0:00 - 0:53 Receiving the alien message
0:53 - 3:15 Interpreting the radio signal
3:15 - 5:00 Mysterious white squares
5:00 - 5:43 Mysterious purple blob
5:43 - 7:27 Mysterious green clusters
7:27 - 7:36 Mysterious blue twirlies
7:36 - 8:05 Mysterious red figure
8:05 - 9:34 More mysterious white squares
9:34 - 10:28 Mysterious yellow dots
10:28 - 11:12 Mysterious purple thing
11:12 - 13:08 Even MORE mysterious white squares
13:08 - Fun fact about the Arecibo message
13:48 Thank you Skillshare!
Creator - Jade Tan-Holmes
Script - Joshua Daniel
Editing - Christian Pearson and Jade Tan-Holmes
Music - epidemicsound.com - Věda a technologie
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First!
Interesting views on the earlier sent message. Thank you
Love the music at the end!
25,000 light years away? The signal will be so attenuated below the CMB that it will be undetectable regardless how sensitive the aliens' receiver is!
This image showed up as a crop circle.
Alien #1: What is that?
Alien #2: Ah, it's nothing. Just Tetris...
The most important part of this signal is that it exists. If we received a similar message, we may or may not be able to decipher it -- aliens may think very differently than us. But the simple fact that it was clearly artificial and resolved into some sort of message would change the world.
If we ever receive a signal it will be from a beacon. The message will be "Kilroy woz ere".
@@XiOjala If a black hole comes between the transmitter and us, it can work like a lens and briefly make a much stronger signal. I think this suggests the first message received will be something like
"Drink Vogon Cola for its new muddier taste"
"Have you or a loved one been injured ..."
"Thus proving that intelligent life can never be carbon based"
"We now end our broadcasting day"
Wow!
@@kensmith5694
"We're no strangers to love"
"you know the rules and so do I"
@@Kuchenwurst Yes that is likely too.
Such a clever idea for a video! I love how it communicates maths, physics, chemistry and biology all together like one big happy family. At least we present a united front to the aliens 😂
yeah, the language of maths, really makes it possible
I appreciate that she stored a physics text in her refrigerator. That was at least as obvious as some of the leaps required to decode the message.
It's because physics is cool.
@@meyes1098If it's cool, then why does it have to be refrigerated?
@@RJiiFin it's because physics is hot!
At 7:19, thankfully they did not actually get this wrong! Deoxyribose changes structure somewhat in order to link with the phosphate groups to form DNA. So even though isolated deoxyribose has the formula C5H10O4, the deoxyribose units *as they appear in DNA* are indeed C5H7O, just as the message says. Probably doesn't do much to make it any more comprehensible to aliens, but it does at least restore my faith in the fact-checking ability of the folks at Arecibo :)
I also recall a fascinating - if somewhat frustrating - video from I think Veritasium (or maybe mindfield) where they put random people together in a room and presented a supposed alien message in the exact same format as the Aricebo Message, except it was just random noise, to see if they’d invent patterns where there aren’t any. And after some time they successfully concluded that it was noise. Which is really cool - it proves that human-like intelligence could detect an artificial message even if they can’t decipher it (since we can conclude from the experiment that they could identify a non artificial message even when primed to expect the opposite) but also frustrating because it would have been way more fun to see them try to decode an actual Arecibo like message
Actually, it only proves that a human-like intelligence would not mistake noise for an artificial message. It does not prove the opposite. You could still mistake message for noise.
Hi! I was one of the people in that Mindfield Episode.
There were two groups...one was given noise, and the other the real Arecibo message. (I didn't know about it at the time.) They scrapped the second part of the episode because the other group was unable to decipher the code at all...I would have had so much fun doing this, and it was kind of bummer for me. Looks like a blast.
@@KohuGaly To clarify, I mean if WE got a message, not if aliens got ours. now you might think "But Zaphod! If the alien brains sending us a message are TOO weird, then maybe we'll never know it was a message!" and, sure, but my counter to that is any alien mind so alien we can't even recognize it as intelligent is effectively worthless to us. What's the point of finding alien life we can never communicate with or understand? May as well just join a Cthulhu cult at that point.
@KohuGaly Seems to only prove that human like intelligence _might_ not mistake noise for intelligent communications.
@@JWishnov Did they at least get as far as identify that there is a message? That they just don't know how to decipher it?
I love how you ask us questions if we deciphered the particular segment, then jumping over to the periodic table or dna molecule diagram, exclaiming "yes! " .
5:17 - 5:23
7:10 - 7:20
This is giving me such strong dora vibes!!
You could've made this entire video in dora the explorer format and could've been "Jade, the alien message decoder!"
Thanks for taking the time to explain the message! Fun Fact: The Arecibo message was used by one of the puzzles in the Master Theorem puzzle book.
nice, it is proving that this message is more a time capsule of 1974 rather than a useful message for any aliens. It will be for them just like finding only 1 tablet in mesopotamian desert from unknown civilization, at the best a stone in a museum, more certainly nothing. Nice video.
Except that it is at least proof of intelligence. Even meaningless (to us) clay tablets at least tell us that people were indeed there and had a system for writing on clay, which is actually both a lot and tantalizingly little.
I will also add that, once the grid was generated, I was able to work out most (not quite all) of the message pretty quickly and ahead of the video. But that is using human knowledge, so I am not sure that an alien would understand it. For example, the DNA picture and human figure are probably not at all obvious. I would have some hope that the molecular compositions would eventually (after much toil) lead the aliens to reconstruct the helical structure of DNA, but the prospect of them ever realizing that we sent a self-portrait is dicey at best in my opinion. The lengths were especially challenging. Given that only one identifiable length is associated with the message, it does make some sense to measure in terms of it (assuming that there is no red-shifting), but I would have encoded self-referential information somehow so that they could calibrate and make the associations more easily. In order to do this, I would have sent the waveform for the beginning of the message with a symbol which represents the wavelength; I would have put the wavelength symbol right next to the other references to lengths too. Then, I would have tried to encode some sort of detail about the wavelength scale at which we are sending the message (not sure how to do this), so that they can calculate its dilation. Also, I would have thrown in a few checks such as encoding the size of our Sun (the star from which they are receiving the message) so that they can be confident that they are getting reasonable sizes. The red-shift of the Sun for them would also allow them to check the dilation factor, which would add further confidence to the interpretation. The issue, of course, is that a larger grid would be needed.
It looks artificial enough, that it would warrant more detailed study of the region of space it originated from. You might not understand a 23x73 grid of pixels, but years worth of radio and TV transmissions in multiple languages, correlating with each other, with planets rotation and orbit, and occasionally with scientific concepts...
And make no mistake - if they have telescopes powerful enough capture arecebo message in random screening, they have telescopes powerful enough to detect regular radio and TV when they know where to look.
"more certainly nothing" - Nonsense, of course an intelligent species would notice that it is an artificial signal. Why do people upvote this comment?
It's actually pretty useful, it tells the most important message given the distance - how DNA works. The rest is just some trivia in comparison.
The solution to the Fermi Paradox: We're not alone, but the aliens don't want to make contact because our scientists sound desperate
The aliens might already be here.
"Bro, these aliens keep sending us unsolicited pics of their DNA and their coordinates. Just blacklist the entire system. Creeps."
It is clear to me you knew how the message works before you 'deciphered' it (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's still a good educational video). I would love to see an experiment done where this message (and perhaps some alternatives) is given a mix of people: Mathematicians, Physicists, Biologists, and a regular person. (Maybe other specialities too, but I'm thinking about who would be the ones trying to decpiher an alien message if we ever got one) - Split them into many groups - each group containing a mix of specialitie - sand give them some time, maybe an hour, maybe a week, and see if any of the groups manage to decypher it.
p.s. personally, I think the idea of using the wavelength of the message as a ruler is very natural and clever. I can't think of anything that would work better, other than the plank length - but that would require numbers so large that it would make the message harder to understand in my opinion. I think they made the right choice. It was such a natural choice in my opinion, that out of all the parts of the message, it was the one I figured out the quickest and easiest. My thought process was "They can't have possibly used any units because they would have to describe the units in the message, and to describe the units they would have to use units. It can't be the plank length because that would be too small. It must be encoded in the size of the message somehow. The only way I could see it doing that is by being a multiple of the wavelength".
The hardest part was the molecular part. I don't think it is obvious at all that you have to "line up" the numbers with the life producing elements to get the molecules. I would have thought, if I could figure out they meant elements at all, that they were directly describing molecules. (e.g. 7 3 1 2 3 would not mean "7 Hydrogen, 3 Oxygen, etc" but would rather mean "one element with atomic number 7, two elements with atomic number 3, one element with atomic number 1, etc). I would think 'perhaps it is a polymer, and the order of the numbers shows it's repeating structure'
I found the molecular part the most intuitive part, but I have a chemistry background.
As soon as she read the numbers at the top I thought "atomic numbers of elements".
And the way the others were arranged below it, with each one having the same number of columns strongly indicated the top was a legend/key of some sort.
I see how using the signal essentially as a ruler is really clever, but I would never have figured it out.
A.I. is probably good enough now to help decipher such a message. Or it is on its way to doing so.
With respect: she addresses this in the section where she relays how Drake gave the message to a group of scientists, none of whom could solve the whole thing but who collectively deciphered the entire message.
@@GSBarlev Thank you, I should have edited the comment once I finished watching the video. However, I don't think that invalidates the idea of having different groups try and decypher different messages to see which patterns are the most universal.
@@GSBarlev sure a bunch of human scientists deciphered an encoded message made by humans. I feel like there would be a lot more work to even start with deciphering an alien message when considering the possible gaps in knowledge. we have a solid understanding of what humans know, or knew in the past. It gives a pretty good idea of where to looking. it's a whole different challenge if you're trying to decipher something with a totally unknown origin or the knowledge base of where/when it was originated. When dealing with the alien message we won't have a good way to reference knowledge of a specific time in history like we do for relics found on earth. There's writings that originated on earth that haven't been deciphered and a lot of that is because it's hard to find when/where they originated. without that kind of information on the originator it significantly increases the difficulty. the very first steps in this video of figuring out the two sounds were just brushed over and considered trivial, but those first steps are likely to be the most difficult when getting a message from non-humans. those are the steps that create the foundation for the entire message, the rosetta stone if you will.
This was an absolute blast to watch!!! It was a very good thought exercise, thank you for sharing this with us😊
I LOVE this!!! Not only does it show a thinking process in trying to communicate to those who have zero idea(s) about you or other life even, but it highlights the differences between using one's own expertise VS being able to connect pieces of the puzzle in a more general form. You effectively brought up lots of really good facets of this communication issue. And whether anyone realizes it or not, the more we can understand how to understand, the easier it will be to make things for those who are not told how to understand it! Hope that made sense lol.
I loved the bit where you're suprised how similar the aliens are to us 😂
The ETs already responded to this message with the same format as a crop circle. Look into it.
We don't know if aliens are similar to us, we don't even know if aliens will be carbon-based like us.
They could be silica based or ammonium based for all we know.
We don't even know what chemical mixes there are that can only be present through biological processes.
@@govcorpwatch that is what i was hoping this video would talk about!
@@govcorpwatchwhat?
@@proloycodes It's known as "The Arecibo Reply." It appeared in a field in the UK in 2001. It's a crop circle which yielded an image similar to the Arecibo Message, but with some key differences. Silicon is included in the list of elements, and three planets are emphasized. The figure of a man is replaced by one of a large-headed semi-humanoid, and the radio telescope is replaced by what looks like a representation of a crop circle. Now, whether you think that it was made by extraterrestrials is entirely up to you!
What a great idea to do this Jade! I enjoyed it thoroughly, thank you!
Plot twist: she's an actual alien with a delightful sense of humor
Ooooh I love this video 😀
I have been explaining the content of the Aricebo message several times to the public at the observatory, while showing M13, but I never thought about stepping into “the others’” shoes to try to figure it out.
Love it! 😊
Excellent video . I hope the aliens smoke pipes like Sherlock otherwise i’m afraid they will miss the clues. Can we not simply beam this video into space ? They will be grateful 😊 you saved them quite some time.
Well, at least with some MPEG specs embedded or they wouldn't know how to decode it
OMG, you still have a *National double-deck cassette player boombox with AM and FM radio.* Amazing! It made me nostalgic for my own teenage years. I held on to mine till the 2010s, when I could no longer find technicians or spare parts to keep fixing it. By that time, most of my cassette tapes too had died from overuse. Of course, they don't make cassette tapes or even CDs anymore. Streaming services have replaced everything. I'm so happy you still have your boombox-I bet it's a collector's item now!
I think deoxyribose part has the correct number of hudrogens, you have to consider that some bonds are connecting with the other bits rather than being occupied by hydrogen as you would see in the free molecule.
I like the fact sending a super simplified pixel image of a really complex real thing (like our solar system) and how aliens are rushing to the wall, pointing on an image of our solar system and screaming: This is it! The are there, start your engines!
I think it's supposed that aliens will try to find out from where the signal was made and will try to send it back and add some information. And it's supposed that they know about our galaxy and that it will be possible to figure out where to search. If they will just understood that it was send from Milky Way, well they can just spam signals so it will eventually reach out our planet. And if I was the alien, I would say "Send the responding message to every third planet of any star systems of this galaxy" because of the way the images show us the planets.
Ooh I read a computer magazine article with that image when I was a kid, took a while for my father to convince me it wasn’t sent by aliens 😂 never got the accompanying code to run in our computer (was written for a different platform) but it did push me to try and better understand computer programming at the time, just out of curiosity… thank you for the video, now I understand what it was about!
If I could take a guess.... That code would have been most likely a form of 'BASIC'. This was the typical go-to language for the magazines since most computers back then where running or had a form of the BASiC language installed. And if so, it would have been extremely easy to convert it into any kind of BASIC you had on your computer.
It may have been very very maybe 'Pascal' though. And f not, it also could have been an early version of C (but that would be VERY doubtful as that was VERY specialized and only used for real proper low level programming.... You would never see it in popular magazines).
When I see the string of 0s and 1s first thing I thought about was byte and bit and ASCII,
I had never known that the message design was that well thought thru. It's pretty clever and concise. Thanks for explaining it.
Excellent video on a topic that brings back memories of childhood. I remember when that message was first sent out. Not everyone thought it was a good idea.
Reminds me of that Mind Field episode where Vsauce Michael stevens gathered some random people to decode a scrambled up version of this, super cool to see how people without any prior knowledge solved this
That episode is T3.E6 ∙ How to Talk to Aliens.
Amazing video!!! Could you please decipher the Voyagers' golden record next???
The ET's have already responded to this message via crop circle in the exact same format. look into it.
@@govcorpwatch lol
Could you also please decipher the Voynich manuscript?
Love how you stepped through all the details in the message!
I LOVE your channel. This video was a lot of fun. We need to get content like this in classrooms for kids.
Would the doppler effect change the wavelength of the message by the time it got there? If so, whoever (successfully) decodes it is going to think humans are HUGE.
You mean RED SHIFT....
Yes, it will have an influence, but the aliens will figure that out just as we can easily figure that out by just looking at the radio message, and compensate for that. It is basic astronomy.
However, that wont change the message itself at all. The dots will still be dots, so to speak. The 14 units heights, will still be 14 units and not magically change to 213453246 units.
The only thing that will change is the strength of the radiowave both in frequency and amplitude. Which, again, is fairly easily compensated (the message was send on a special frequency which doesn't occur, much, in nature. So, Aliens wil know that too)
I would say it's unlikely because the hope is that they are able to locate the origin of the message, with the added help of the given solar system description. And just as we use certain stars as our 'standard candles', they ought to be able to determine the redshift and this original broadcast frequency, since they'd have all necessary information about distance and time relative to us/them
@@sivansharma5027In no way would we be able to pinpoint the star this message originated from if it is coming from 25000LY away. The margin of error would mean a difference large enough to completely miss the right star. And without the distance, it is impossible to calculate the redshift.
We would need a receiver array spanning multiple planets in our solar system to correctly triangulate the message origin, and that's almost impossible to sync up given the distances. Syncing a telescope array of just a few radio telescopes next to each other on earth is already a huge technical challenge.
@@minecrafter0505I think if you figure out what galaxy it’s from you still might find the right Doppler effect and red shift without knowing what star and if there close enough then they might figure out what star system as well.
@@kordellcurl7559 25,000 light years is well within the Milky Way Galaxy. It's about 1/4 of the diameter. It would be more relevant to say it would be difficult to figure out _which_ star in a globular star cluster it came from. Also at that distance the red shift would be small in comparison to other galaxies. Measurable, but not a big problem.
This was very exciting and entertaining! Well done, Jade!
Jade, it is so refreshing to see and hear you talk. Any subject. I am a scientist and philosopher, but spent most of my time now debunking creationism. It feels like we are living in two parallel universes, scientifically and politically speaking. If I need a breath of fresh air, I come to your channel!
I heard a story a radio astronomer working out of Arecibo picked up a radio signal from another planet.
He realized it was only a tiny bit bigger than the Arecibo message so when he arranged the date to the same dimensions, sure enough, the signal was the Arecibo massage with a small addition, just 7 words, in English,
:Be quiet or they will hear you.
Fun fact, if whoever receives the Arecibo message has the same criteria we require to say for sure it is an alien message, it would fail to meet that requirement.
i would be very interested to see the results of an experiment where a group of students try to decipher the aricebo message on their own. maybe post-grad students sorted by fields: physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, anthropology? maybe sorted by their cultural backgrounds because that seems like an important factor.
i'd also be interested in an experiment where a group of students are given 2 messages, one being the aricebo message and one being noise, and have to determine which was which.
René Heller at the Max Planck Institute created a very similar competition in 2016, in which was encoded: the height of the aliens; their typical lifespan; how big their radio telescope was; how long they have been communicating interstellar; their planet and orbital period and the age of their stellar system.
Very good explanation for refreshing this message! I had forgot many details.
But then...
How about looking into the "Arecibo answer" projected in a field close to the Chilbolton radio telescope in England in 2001?
How likely would this be ET created or man made, considering the transmission figure at the bottom identical with another detailed crop circle shown there one year before?
I think it's very likely to be an authentic ET respons until otherwise prooved.
a crop circle? why and how would they answer with a crop circle?
@@gamerninjask6746 Are you familiar with the mentioned crop circles (rectangle)?
@@nielspeterborgennielsen1386 yes i know what it is
@@gamerninjask6746 Fine. How would you imagine an answer could be in a public visible way, otherwise?
7:20 The sugar formula in the Arecibo message is not wrong. It shows the number of atoms as seen on the sugar within a DNA helix backbone. OH groups at 3' and 5' positions of deoxyribose sugar are used up to make bonds with phosphate groups above and below along the backbone. You see, they mentioned PO4 correctly that accounts for those bound oxygen atoms. The third missing OH group is at 1' of the sugar which is used to bind with the nitrogen base. Therefore omitted to avoid over-counting. So there are three OH less in DNA-bound deoxyribose compared to a free deoxyribose. Hence, you get C5H7O instead of C5H10O4. I understand your background is in physics or math and not in organic chemistry. But you should rethink before calling something or someone wrong, especially if it falls outside of your academic domain of knowledge or expertise.
You're right, my bad!
@@topherthe11th23 Yes, except for the part about using the term "my bad". Though by saying that I feel I may have just created an endless cycle. :)
@@topherthe11th23 Yes, saying "my bad" is not grammatically correct, and is usually used by people in the wrong so they don't feel as bad about being in the wrong. It should never be used professionally or in the customer service industry.
That's a cool physics text book you've got. Have a good day everyone!
25,000 light years away. It won't be received for 25,000 years and if there is a radio answer we won't get it for 25,000 years: a 50,000 year round trip. Who knows what can happen on either end. Even if we get our own message back whose to say we could even interpret that it was our original message?
I must say, Jade, you are ingenious and absolutely amazing! Love what you taught and how you taught. You make it all so interesting. After almost 40 years teaching at a college level this was amazingly refreshing. Keep it up.
Love how maths, binary in electronics, wavelengths in physics and structures in chemistry are used as universal language
Fun video! I think I would be very unsatisfied if I was an alien that fully deciphered such a message. I wonder if there has been work done to create a more comprehensive and understandable and helpful message.
There has! arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2203/2203.04288.pdf
This is the best we could do at the time. The message is not intended for any alien to pick up, but only the experts among them.
@@User-jr7vf if I was an alien expert I would be very unsatisfied with such a message. I don't know how much time Frank Drake spent on this, but in my opinion (and it's just one guy's opinion) he certainly was capable of a better attempt.
I really wonder if a picture was the right way to go. I mean, what if they don't think in rectangles? or if they think things go right-to-left? etc. For a first message I think we should've sent the digits of pi or e (in binary of course). And then maybe preface the Arecibo message with 73 x 23 = 1,679 before sending it.
Yeah some of the choices seem to questionable to me. I'm sure they had some knock down drag out fights in meetings. I assume the thinking was that even if they're not like us, they could see our attempt to reach out and understand us.
True the first part should have been 23 and 73, linear. Or maybe just 23. In which case the message should have been limited to the metadata and then some image, no numbers and counts. The DNA is overkill and it won't be guessed. So basically the number of lines, then possibly the number of columns as an extra clue. The number of pixels can also be a useful clue. Then a picture and that's it.
The rectangle option is pretty much the only choice given the format of the message. Two numbers means you only have two dimensions to play with and there are very few options for dealing with that. Even if rectangles aren't their "natural" polygonal shapes, they'll almost certainly understand the concept long before they'd be able to figure out anything else in the message.
As for the reading order, that's given by the binary digits. 1 is less than 2 is less than 3, so just following basic incremental order tells you the reading order. Not that anything else in the image really cares which direction you read.
Sending pi or e would be difficult. Binary is very straightforward for positive integers, but encoding the rest of the real number line relies much more on convention. Just simple negative integers has 3 well-known binary encodings (sign-magnitude, 1's complement and 2's complement - almost all modern computers use the latter for technical reasons, but the others have both been used in the past). Encoding real numbers requires a standard convention like IEEE754 that aliens definitely wouldn't understand and there's no way it could be described within the already very small message.
Sending the message length before the message wouldn't be much use. Decoding it would require knowing the binary code in use, and the binary code in use is only discernably after you've worked out the message length -> rectangle step at which point you don't really need a redundant copy of the message length.
@@altrag All good points. Digits aside, somehow conveying an advanced understanding of pi or e might be interesting.
The purpose of 1 to 10 on the first line is to define the correct orientation of the message.
Your choice of book to relax to is excellent.
The physics book was pretty cool too…
I love how you went through and explained the different parts of the message and how it was put together. :)
But listening to the logic of how it was put together was also a little discouraging. The whole thing seems to depend on the aliens using binary, which they might not use. And there are a lot of things that you interpret from the message that rely on systems they might not have. Could there be other ways of classifying atoms rather than by their atomic numbers? What if they're not familiar with double helixes, or even mirrors? And I don't quite get the sense of using 1.76 meters in the message. What will our units mean to them?
It's an interesting shot in the dark, but I think it depends too much on our culture.
Thank you for this fun and informative video Jade 👋😁
You keep your physics book on ice 😂😂👍
I decoded the message!
It`s just the following text:
"We're out of beer!
Does anyone have a few bottles left?"
I think that one of the problems with such a massage is that there are a rew assumptions that may not apply to vastly different alien life. Apart from understanding when something is a picture and when it is a number, if their vision is vastly different from ours they may never understand what the picture is supposed to be.
While the binary system for code and the periodic table have very useful traits that make them much more likely to be used over others once found, we can't be completely sure they will use those conventions or decipher that this is what we mean, especially when it may be difficult to understand when one bit of the massage end and another start.
Don't get me wrong, it is far more universal than I could have come up with, but I doubt if we or aliens could actually conclude that a massage has been actually sent and what it means if either were to receive one.
Exactly my thought. A flat picture implies a visual creature with a retina, able to capture photos on a flat surface (the retina). A sheet of paper is our very specific way of "encoding" what we normally capture via our retinas. That's why we have photos, paintings, screens and such.
But aliens might have different ways of capturing the electromagnetic field, maybe a 3d one or a linear one (like our ears). A semiprime is a neat way of "hinting" that "two" is a key concept in the signal, but going from "two primes" to "a picture with a width and an height" seems to far stretched to me, not really universal and very dependant on our vision system.
Imagine if aliens come to visit, detect Planet X in our Solar system and be like: Naaah, we got the wrong address, boys.
Or say: "there's no planet past Neptune..."
I bet this message came from the grooviest planet in the Milky Way, a.k.a. Earth.
Our civilization just couldn't decipher what Donkey Kong is trying to say.
Loved this breakdown of the message. I knew what it represented from a poster with labels but not how it would be decoded by another civilization.
Imagine receiving a message like that here on earth!
how much of that did you decipher and how much time did it take you?
I am very curious, because for me there are way to many steps and mixes of various systems.
In some way it makes me think that only humans could interpret it since we are often confronted with these types of symbolisms.
I agree. It’s all very well noticing for example that there are (or were) nine planets around the sun and matching that to the large block and smaller dots and lines. But unless you already knew that there were nine planets in the senders solar system, or more accurately nine things that they classify as planets, then it is a huge stretch to reach for that conclusion.
It’s likely an intelligent alien species would decide some of it quickly while some of it might never be decoded. Certainly, alien academics would be arguing over it for a long time with no way to validate.
I'm assuming this took the known message and worked backwards. There's a lot of leaps in logic and no mistakes. Things like coloring parts of the message, for example, would require a massive leap to conclude without knowing what the sections were from the outset. It's an entertaining and educational video, but I think posing it as "deciphering" is a little disingenuous.
Carl Sagan gave the solution on tv in 1983. It's well known to people interested in METI since then. I agree that aliens will never decipher it on their own. They can't even count the pulses unless they are listening and recording at the time the message arrives, which they will not receive notice of. The message was written, in actuality, for us.
@@lukesmith9455That's exactly what I was thinking. Others might be able to make it out with nothing to go on, but humans being human could make it out a lot easier.
Your videos are so comforting when I watch then I feel like I'm in a safe space
I can believe that astonishing serendipity that you have decided to film in front of this particular wall and pictures on it
:o)
Great video, thank you very much!
You are really amazing and the effort you are putting is remarkable...thank you ❤
Yeah there are definitely a lot of flaws in this message. The one that stood out to me was the information about DNA. If this message were to reach an alien civilization, what if those aliens evolved with a genetic material that wasn’t a DNA double helix?? It seems to me the information about DNA would be rather unhelpful and uninterpretable if the aliens have no way of recognizing it.
That's partially true.... DNA, RNA, etc are the very fundamental basic building blocks for life. It would be extremely hard presses if aliens don't have something similar to DNA. It might not be a double helix, but it most likely will be something extremely similar as that IS how life works.
Remember, that EVERYTHING used in this message is BASIC and FUNDAMENTALLY UNIVERSAL physics, math or chemistry. There are absolutely no 'pure human' constructs or 'pure human' concepts in this message. EVERYTHING is firmly bases in fundamental universal physics, law and constants, which are the same everywhere.
Aliens might not call them the same (probably wouldn't, lol), but the concept and what they mean, how they work and interact, how they relate to each other, in their form of science WILL be the EXACT same as these are all fundamental universal concepts firmly based on physics and math.
If there is an alien planet for each person alive today, that would make 7.9 billion retarded planets, and under 10,000 planets with a few smart aliens. Unless of course you consider how ignorant all of them are.
Yes, the DNA part does seem unlikely. They also used up a lot of the message on it.
Binary numbers seems reasonable. Once you think they are likely to get that, giving the numbers for the left column of the periodic table seems right. 1,3,11,19,37,55 should let someone figure out that what follows are chemical things. What follows could be something that suggest water, sugar and oxygen or something like that.
Since chemistry is chemistry everywhere in the universe, it's actually likely that DNA and RNA or very similar is what all life would be structured from, for the same reason a base is a base and an acid is an acid. Only specific chemicals interact in specific ways, so it becomes harder to make life work the more you deviate from known biology, just from a chemistry point of view. It seems possible to have completely different forms of life, for instance silicon based life, but then you start running headlong into the problem of what elements are the most common and how likely it is to have the right combination for vastly different life.
Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen are so abundant, specifically on a rocky world that it makes sense most life would incorporate these, particularly since water itself is so abundant and is a perfect solvent. Some of the other elements life uses here aren't as common everywhere and there are other elements that can be substituted, which is where major differences in life will likely be found (as there are bacteria here on Earth that use Arsenic instead of Phosphorus). But the basic structure of RNA/DNA, etc are likely universal even if arranged differently.
@@Kelnx Nah, bacteria can't use Arsenic instead of Ph.
There was a study, published in Nature, claiming one could - but it's since been proven false.
For details, look up GFAJ-1.
As a fellow fan of The Three Body Problem trilogy, I'd be filled with instant delight or dread depending on how quickly aliens solve the code. Great video as always Jade.
You are bugs!
This was an amazing video!!! More like this please. I love your channel!!!
This gave me the same feeling like when I'm trying to decipher what another software dev was trying to accomplish as they clearly did not take anyone else into consideration when they wrote their code.
This would be a most excellent lesson in a signals class. Really enjoyable to watch this.
Great deciphering video! I enjoyed how you've connected scientific and mathematical facts by decoding a seemingly random set of tones. If the aliens do arrive, will you be our interpreter? Cheers, Jade! 😍🤓🥰
This video doesn't decipher anything. It just shows how Sagan and Drake came up with the message.
The first answer to find is "What questions are most relevant?" Look for the possible framework at the other end of the message. So, possible topics are location / details about location (Where) and the sender / details (Who). What, When, Why, and How are the other big questions found in reporting on Earth, and presumably everywhere. They are universal, like math.
The diversity needed for deciphering is super helpful and timesaving. The experts are chosen from different fields, which are selected by importance of the fields (in this context). Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, etc.
If it were me, I would not allow them to collaborate. The Delphi method of problem-solving is to have individuals work on their own, collect the responses, then send out all of the responses to the participants. Finally, gather more responses, and possibly hold a group session where items are addressed and debated.
The most remarkable part about these aliens is that they seem to know every poster you have on your wall!!!!
Would the signal even be strong enough to reach M13? I mean, inverse square law and all?
It's actually worse than that-by the time our signal arrives... M13 won't actually be there. The Aricebo Message was very explicitly at the time a technological demonstration and not something that could actually make first contact. Cite: Prof. Donald Campbell of Cornell University
@@GSBarlev Oof!
One interesting assumption: Aliens will read from left to right, top to bottom.... 🙂
Arabic:
I'm just saying that
I can say it for sure that those aliens ARE never arabs, simply because none of these extraterrestrials have attacked us, at least so far,.
😅
"Glshxnarxh! I've decoded the message! Now we know their weaknesses, and how many of them are there! Prepare the fleet. Destroy them!"
i love semiprime numbers, and i have used them in creating riddles. its so satisfying when someone realizes the number of tokens in a ciphertext is semiprime!
Super convenient you have the answers behind you on your wall in the same order they appear in the message! What are the odds?? haha, love the video though.
It's a good thing those aliens have a handy wall poster display to reference when they decipher the message! I also love the fridgics text book.
This was a wonderful video as usual, Jade!
The aliens will need to be incredibly smart to understand this without knowing about how we communicate. Guessing the grid arrangement, understanding that the first (actually the fourth row down) bit was a start bit would be a stretch too.
I mean, hopefully they will be orders of magnitude smarter than us so they may be able to decode this, but if the scientists were trying to only make contact with far superior aliens to become our overlords I think they have gone about it the right way.
While true, I don't believe any step of this process is impossibly difficult as long as the alien intelligence level is similar to our own. They could probably be sure about a lot of the message, although some parts (like guessing that the number to the right of the human signifies population) would have a few possible hypotheses.
@@zmaj12321 you think? They lost me when they decided to write the numbers with a vertical, top down binary number count with a start bit as the most significant bit. Then it just got less and less likely with each assumption.
To be honest, I'm curious who here on Earth would be able to work it out if it was just transmitted at some random frequency.
I just realised I can't remember if she said what frequency it was transmitted and what modulation type. So even hearing it relies on the assumption that they are closely monitoring a wide range of wavelengths.
@@MrGundawindy I don't think the difficulty is a big deal. The main assumption here is that there exist enough aliens that are at least as smart as the smartest humans. And there don't need to be that many smart aliens, since the message only needs to be decoded once.
They don't need to be incredibly smart. EVERYTHING in the message is extremely easy to decode if you know your basic physics, math and chemistry.
Heck, even back in the day I clearly remember (smart) school kids where able to 'crack' most of it.
When you love doing math and have a notion of the fundamental binary numbering system, it is as easy as 1 2 3. ANY computer programmer will recognize those binary numbers from far away without even bashing an eye lid, no matter in what order or orientation they are written.
Everything in the message is basic and only based on fundamental physics and constants, nothing in it is arbitrary or human-centric (as some said). It is all based in physics and maths, which is the same in all of the universe.
People here have decoded cyphers which are magnitudes more difficult than this.
@@MrGundawindy _"I'm curious who here on Earth would be able to work it out if it was just transmitted at some random frequency. "_
I have seen college students literally doing it.
Decoding it is NOTHING hard at all.... as long as you know math (most important thing), basic physics (eg: speed of light) and some biology/chemistry (for the aminoacids/dna part)
If aliens saw this, they probably would think we're telling them about our very large population of soldiers and the final drawing is the super 'death star' weapon we will used to destroy them with.
Otherwise it seems rather pointless.
First white part: "We are sending a message"
Purple: A first triangular ship will arrive.
Green part: A mothership will come later.
Blue part + red part: controlling super soldiers mind will land.
White part inside the blue: Super soldiers will be teleported to your planet with thunders.
Left and right of the human: Super soldiers with swords and shields
Yellow: The land will vibrate with earthquakes
Purple bottom: There is a mothership with death ray
Blue + white bottom: We will separate your water from land, and last shot will be in the middle of land.
Be prepared
So basically, in order to device this message, the aliens would make a series of wild assumptions and embrace every conspiracy theory. 🤣
This video should be in the Summer of Math Exposition 3, although it is not explicitly math oriented. This is very sweetly done, and the Physics textbook in the refrigerator was humorous.
Looks to me like you know what this message is supposed to say. It would be more interesting to see what someone with skills at decoding messages but doesn’t know what it is would make out of it.
You’re missing the point. She’s telling a story.
I always struggle with this sort of thing as it makes huge assumptions that the "aliens" use the same terminology/units as us when defining and describing things about themselves AND that they are the same as us which is highly unlikely.
Makes a lot more sense if this was an alien message to us specifically sent by them to show they understand our languages and OUR makeup and are purposefully sending it in a language of our understanding rather than in their natural terms/tongue so we have more chance of deciphering it.
Still love the video, obvs - wonderful as ever.
Feel free to invent your own first contact message! Science fiction writers excel at this sort of thing.
Somewhere, some alien is saying that same thing, and other aliens dismiss him as a conspiracy theorist, claiming he said the same thing about their alien pyramids.
I do love this. It really shows how hard it is to communicate to beings that don't have the same complex form of communication that we do. We need to use such a complex abstraction that the note we sent requires a method of decoding as absurd as the methods used by numerologists trying to tell us when the world will end
The whole multiplication and division using the speed of light seems flawed as there's no telling what units of measure an alien would use. They might not measure time or distance with the same units of measure, so I'm not sure how even if they thought of multiplying or dividing the encoded number 14 for instance by the speed of light, would come out to the same value as what the humans intended it to be decoded as.
It's unitless-or, rather, the units are multiples of the wavelength, which would be the same for any observer after correcting for redshift.
_"They might not measure time or distance with the same units of measure"_ - It does not matter what units they use. The ratio of the size of the human to the wavelength of the radio signal would still be 14. They could measure the wavelength in their units, multiply that with 14, and get the correct height of the human in their units. That is, if they would actually think of doing that comparison, and if the wavelength would not change during the travel.
@@GSBarlevBut correcting for redshift would require them to already have characterized the velocity of our system at the time of transmission as well as the age of the message. Besides which, associating it with the message wavelength is a huge leap.
@@0LoneTech And if they live inside an intense gravity well, they might experience blue-shift due to time dilation.
Basically, this message didn't account for relativity or cosmic expansion at all.
@@renedekker9806 yeah. the video would be waywaywaywayway better then it already is (in my humble opinion) if she had writen an alien character that wasn't simply her spieces (human). She could have imagined a being different from the one pictured in the message like with 4 arms or whatever and made up some random units like "oh if we multiply these 14 units with the wavelenght of 92 zorpowopers we get a being that is twice our size". lol i dont know. The video is great though
I'm an alien, and I was wondering how you decided which parts to make different colors at 3:14...you had some context going in...I understand that you had a point to make, and adding this wrinkle would have muddied it, but that little thing kinda wrecks the whole hypothetical. We would have to agree on what signifies a change of topic/subject, or you get stuck right there.
The different colors are pretty simple. It’s the placement and alignment of each cluster. It doesn’t change anything except make the video easier to follow
@@dannymartial7997 I agree with OP that the color part wouldn't be nearly as straight forward for a real reciever as she made it look. There are some colors overlaping each other like green, blue and white, that are not fixed to an obvious single section of the image.
@@dannymartial7997though green can be isolated by its patterns, you can see where matching clusters repeat and enclose other clusters of the same size.
I feel if aliens somehow had matching or similar brains to ours, repeat efforts of decoding parts and finding your specialty would eventually be able to separate groups.
To me it's the human body and the solar system that would be among the most difficult to understand if you were a completely different organism thousands of light years away.
spectacular! Your delivery is super engaging!
The Arecibo message also has many built-in assumptions that make it less effective if observed by somebody who is not a terrestrial human.
A bit far fetched to think non human would ever understand it
haha I know right
What if they had exactly the same posters behind them though
I didn't think we needed another Arecibo Message decryption video, but that was pretty good (as always)
a rare occurance of high intellect coupled with high charisma. 10/10
When I read the Dark Forest part of The Three Body Problem, I immediately thought of the Arecibo message with horror.
This replaced my usual thought, which is "these aliens have huge blue heads. No clue what the rest of it means."
the message says, "dave's not here, man"
Honestly, there's no chance an alien would understand any of that message. The only humans that were able to figure out anything were ppl familiar with their specialty on the planet they live on..
The assumption here is that an alien civilization with an intelligence level comparable to humans has some means that allows them to understand math, physics, and chemistry. It might look very different from human systems, but as long as they have that knowledge base, it would be possible for them to decode large chunks of the message with a reasonable confidence level.
Now imagine you are an ant on a planet that tries not to starve. Not sure if it will answer. 😂
I really love this solving a puzzle together type video.
This is simultaneously super clever and super dumb. The whole deciphering method is super interesting and very well made once you figured out how to lay out everything. On the other hand, who the hell would decipher this in this way? Did the people designing the message and the encryption try to submit it to humans (scientists probably, I don't expect an average human to know what to do with this), see if THEY can make it out? If we can't, how would aliens figure it out
EDIT : I should've watched until the end, huh?
"You've read about messages from aliens before . . . " *_glances suspiciously at the cover of_** Hitch-hiker's Guide*
Hilarious!
I have wondered this question too. But in the answer in this video I really think knowing the answers has informed too much of which path to go down when looking for the answer. It was more like an explanation on how to interpret it, rather than how someone else would go about solving it.
I'm pretty sure this content is more about getting children interested in science. It would be an incredibly fun video to watch if you were under the age of 15. I mean she even has all the solutions posted on her wall incidentally to help children guess. Realistically it would be far too difficult for them anyway so it doesn't matter that she reveals the intent
Yeah that was the point of the video
Decoding a message like this from aliens just takes a TV cable repair man, and an Apple Mac laptop. I've seen the movie :D
The amazing thing about this mosaic is that if you put it on Conway's Game of Life, press play, wait for it to evolve, and examine the leftover debris, you are in for a HUGE surprise..
This was fun to watch even though I already knew the story. A new presenter with a fresh perspective.
To me, breaking the signal down into a matrix formed from composite primes would have been trivial. A lot of stuff after that would have been iffy for me.
So now the question is what would modern AI do with this. I wouldn't trust a neural network because neural networks cheat both in their coding and in their training. Not really how it would go down but just to illustrate, a neural network might train itself by watching this Up And Atom video.
As far as I know, we don't have anything like a double blind experiment to determine how good a particular AI algorithm is.
Me too keeps my important books in the fridge just to keep them cool.
They want planet Earth 🌏 to join the galactic federation . But we are not ready for the revelation of aliens being more intelligent then us . 😊
If humans ever meet aliens, I’m glad we have you to help interpret and be our ambassador. You have a most wonderful personality.
Alien 1: So we are looking at a blue elephant, with big blue ears, a white stripe down its back, and a red trunk with four fingers.
Alien 2: Are you sure that the red part isn't a comb?
Alien 3: No it's... I believe that we should cover the young one's eyes now...
Finally, someone else who keeps their textbooks refrigerated 😅