We said that binary values have no intrinsic information (that is true of all other number representations). The Voyager I spacecraft, containing samples of human music and other messages, was the first human artifact to leave the solar system to travel to the stars. How is it possible to communicate with aliens in binary form if there is no intrinsic meaning to the data?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

It is, of course, true that binary data has no intrinsic information, and a pattern of 1s and 0s has no intrinsic meaning other than that given to it by the programmer; for example, we agree that the binary code 01000001 represents the letter ‘A’ in ASCII and represents 65 as an 8421?weighted, unsigned binary, integer.

Science Fiction writers have long thought about how communication might take place between different civilizations. One possible solution is to construct a language using information that can be shared. For example, there are universal constants such as the speed of light, the spectral lines of the hydrogen spectrum, the periodic table and the number of protons in each element. Similarly, there are mathematical concepts such as prime numbers, constants such as ? and e, and so on. So, by transmitting, say, a series of prime numbers or the atomic numbers of members of the periodic table, an alien intelligence would be able to guess the sequence and then work out how the numbers have been encoded.

An interesting case of decoding in the face of little information took place in WW2. The British had German Enigma machines but needed to see a translation of known data before they could perform general decoding. So, they arranged for bombs to be dropped onto empty sea near a German submarine. The German submarine observed the bombs and transmitted their position back to base. The message was intercepted and the decoding performed by looking for the encoded position of the bombs using the known actual position.