Talk:Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence/Archive 1

Preamble
You see, there are especially differing objects -- Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and paranoia because of LHC, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and paranoia because of SETI, METI, Active SETI, Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, etc...

Please don't lump together responsibility and diminished responsibility!

US paranoia
recently I read an a nice article about attempts to contact extraterrestials. The article quoted americans as condemning these attempts because there is a possibility that we won't hear anything back from space because there is a space-faring race of pirates that kill every civilisation that ever made themselves known. +++ stop press +++ yey, I found the article (and kept it for you here). Of course that is pure paranoia. IMHO extraterrestials will contact us very soon with a schematic for a good battery because these advanced beings clearly know that we have an energy crisis and are in danger of blowing ourselves up before they can shake our paws. Y23 (talk) 21:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

History
I've added history up to 1900 but I'm still missing tesla etc. Puddytang 00:39, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Is this cited properly? It seems like it would be a lot more useful if the citations were linked to the text they support, but I always have a hard time with this.Puddytang 00:39, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I hope its not too much information in history. Ley says that "some people" spent thier time trying to compose a letter to the martians. It would start .1 ..2  ...3  ....4 with long _ for addition and sutraction signs...but that seems kind of vague to me and I wonder if he is referring to himself or what.

I'm sure that many other people tried to radio Mars besides Tesla, but I don't know any references. I think I saw somewhere that Marconi wanted to. Puddytang 03:09, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Merging SETI and Active SETI with CETI.
CETI (Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence) includes the discussion of SETI and Active SETI (or METI [Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence]). So I believe that SETI and Active SETI (or METI) should be merged under the discussion of CETI. Lazos Zandes (talk) 00:42, 5 December 2011 (UTC)


 * CETI is an obsolete term, see . At present two established acronyms are widely used -- SETI and METI. ALZ (talk) 19:53, 18 December 2016 (UTC) ALZ (talk) 20:07, 18 December 2016 (UTC), ALZ (talk) 15:58, 22 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Oppose merge; CETI is not being used in the article as an alternative way of describing CETI, but rather as a distinct topic investigating ways in which we could communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence, should the need arise. The article is, overall, well-referenced, and therefore doesn't warrant merging. Klbrain (talk) 19:35, 5 June 2018 (UTC)

References to fiction
The CETI concept is explored extensively in modern fiction. Obviously not all of this is worth including in a serious article. However, there are strong specific examples that might help illustrate concepts to some readers - for example, my first thought of Neal Stephenson's use of the Pythagorean emblem as evidence of intelligence by an alien race in Anathem. Does this seem appropriate? Quantumhuman 9 April 2012 —Preceding undated comment added 22:41, 9 April 2012 (UTC).

Why bother?
What would be the motivation for communicating with extraterrestrials? We could look as some simple signals and what purpose they serve. An early attempt at signaling was the lighthouse on Pharos in ancient Egypt. It's purpose was to get attention and specify its location or bearing. It functioned as an aid to navigation. Something similar is the signal fire that someone stranded on an island at sea might light to get the attention of passing ships or planes. It is a request for assistance. Both are beacons and the message is "come here" or "attention." Another message is that of the fog horn which was used as a collision avoidance mechanism and an echo location system. A transponder in another ship would increase its range and the response time would give distance information. Similar signals could also be used to identify hazards to navigation.

A CETI message would be an attention getting mechanism and be an invitation for further communication. It should be something simple like the CQ used in ham radio. It's justification would be that of mutual assistance and require mutual trust. --Jbergquist (talk) 21:33, 15 January 2014 (UTC)


 * Given that decades or even centuries might elapse between transmission and reception, and an equal time for the return signal, a pure attention getting mechanism would be nice (it would show that Someone is out there), but not very satisfying. If I were Them (assuming of course that there is a Them), I'd send a bit more information, and would appreciate getting more information in return.  Otherwise I won't be around to find out more than the 1 bit. Mcswell (talk) 02:28, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

Laurance Doyle
I read the section referencing Laurance Doyle's claim about a 45 degree line proving that a signal represents language, and I listened to his video, which was clearly intended for a popular audience. IMO, it's a huge over-simplification of a Zipfian distribution (and it doesn't mention that you have to use a log-log scale to get a straight line). At the same time, I can't just edit him out. So instead I added some text, with a tiny bit of explaining of Zipf's law, and citing one of the other references that was already mentioned in the article (Elliott, Atwell and Whyte's article on "Language Identification in Unknown Signals"), which is both scholarly (it was published in a computational linguistics conference) and deeper. I'm not sure the result reads very clearly, but it's the best I could figure out how to do without just deleting the part about Doyle. Mcswell (talk) 02:24, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

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