Comments on: Could You Decipher the Arecibo Message?

By: Staxeon

Staxeon — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:37:28 +0000

Makes me think of movies like Close Encounters and Independance Day, when they try to communicate via flashing sequences of lights. I’m from this planet and have no clue what that crap means, they may be missing the mark with this complicated lite-brite stuff.

By: MikeN49

MikeN49 — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:56:35 +0000

“‘any sentient being’ would recognize the number as the product of two prime numbers (23 and 73)”

Uh, yeah … that was my first thought!

By: Gauldar

Gauldar — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:32:56 +0000

I just found out the reason why they havn’t responded. They know that if they respond now, they’ll get nailed with long distance charges!

By: ByrdBrain

ByrdBrain — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:19:07 +0000

As an American 7 is magical to me? Really? Well, you learn something new everyday…

By: Steohawk

Steohawk — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:54:56 +0000

Unfortunately, even if extraterrestrials get the signal, they’ll have to fly all the way to Earth to ask us what it means.

By: Randy Goat

Randy Goat — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:56:20 +0000

Thats cool, the Chilboton message reveals that our neighbors are closer than 13 light years. This is cute because 13 ly ~ 1.23 10^13 km. Americans & religion freaks shouldn’t be frightened, as 13 ly ~ 7.7 billion miles and 7 is magical to them.

I suspect they are probably as close as the nearest pub. My kind of aliens!

By: Chris Radus

Chris Radus — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:19:34 +0000

The return message will be ” We told you, send more Chuck Berry!”

By: Kalel

Kalel — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:25:42 +0000

If memory serves, it wasn’t just the message from Arecibo that was important, but also the magnitude of the signal itself. For a moment, Earth was the brightest object in the entire galaxy.

With such a loud signal, it shouldn’t be long before our neighbors show up and ask us to please keep it down.

By: taronium

taronium — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:49:17 +0000

Who ever came up with cropcircles was just brilliant enough to make it look interesting, but helped to declare a large group of people sadly deprived of brilliance. The explanation that this would be a way of showing mankind an undeniable presents always annoyed me the most. If instead of cropcircles on earth they would make large enough sand circles on the moon, I’d believe them! ;o) …at least that’s where I’d leave a message for all eyes to see! )

By: db48x

db48x — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:47:11 +0000

We’ll never receive a reply to this message, since the target is too far away. It’ll be lost in the background noise of our galaxy.

On the other hand, the Cosmic Call messages broadcast from Evpatoria in 1999 and 2003 are much more likely to receive a reply. They’re also much more interesting to decode. http://www3.sympatico.ca/stephane_dumas/CETI/evpatoria.html

As for the crop circle, no one ever said that an alien made it, only that someone who had seen the message replied to it in the form of a crop circle.

By: Anon of Ibid

Anon of Ibid — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:01:21 +0000

Of course, if they made the Digital Switchover, they’re not going to be able to get the message even if it does get through.

If it gets through at all it will probably be to some Dead-Tech aficionado who will be called the alien version of “woo-woo” and be accused of making the whole thing up.

By: Foreigner1

Foreigner1 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:28:59 +0000

Almost every geek that I knew during my days of University knew this message by heart. I wasn’t one of them, but I do remember the vivid conversations larded with lots of wine and beer and Wodka and unhealthy food and drugs on what reply we would inevitably get some day…

This was in this one little corner of the world during only about 4-5 years and it involved the about 50-odd geeks that came into my sphere of student-existance about 15-20 years ago.

I gather that this same thing has happened all over the world since that message was broadcasted, with geeks-groups all over the world talking and fantasising about this message and the possible reply.
And so at some point some of these geeks must have linked up with the Funnyheads that make fools out of the Cropcircle-experts and in 2001 the Ultimate Joke came into being- They made The Answer.
And since then it is Partytime and they still smile knowingly while still after all this time following the discussions on the different forums, perhaps even now and then adding some spark to some discussion t keep it alive…

By: M12

M12 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:13:52 +0000

Sheeple #6235623614

We know who you are. Stop it now.

By: Johnny Cat

Johnny Cat — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:28:19 +0000

lol Sheeple.

By: Sheeple #6235623614

Sheeple #6235623614 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:44:59 +0000

If ETs sent a radio signal, you would never even know about it. It would be covered up and black projects would take control of the situation. They would print their messages on land for the simple reason of it being an extremely public method (everyone can see the message). If someone wanted to send a message to the people of a planet they would most likely do it openly instead of sending their message to a government owned radio facility where it could be easily silenced.

Disregard what I’ve just said. It was obviously a couple of people who knew of the original transmission working with boards and ropes in the blackness of night outside of an extremely secure and survailed (infrared cameras, sonic devices, motion censors) government facility for a few hours. What’s on TV tonight?

By: Gauldar

Gauldar — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:04:38 +0000

If I was an alien species and I read this message, I’d think that the people who sent this would be dying to be anal probed. Anyway, isn’t it time we updated the tech, I think we can do a bit better the Commodore 64 graphics by now ya think?

By: Athon

Athon — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:16:53 +0000

Well, ‘grass’ certainly might have something to do with the message. Although acid would be my first guess.

By: wingbatwu

wingbatwu — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:15:28 +0000

Athon: maybe our signal imprinted itself on alien grass?

By: felixthecat

felixthecat — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:55:00 +0000

Well, a red person is standing above a grossly obese purple person, and the purple person is laying eggs. The rest is just gibberish.

By: Athon

Athon — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:20:48 +0000

So…alien technology that allows it to travel through space results in the squashing of grass to leave its message? Ahh…yeah.

Seriously, how can any serious writer simply swallow this as a given? No ‘reportedly’ or ‘Person X says’. Just the writer accepting that indeed, a crop circle made by aliens responded to the message.