Could a signal sent from another civilisation contain as much detail like in the movie Contact?

Question

Firstly what parts of the movie are pure science fiction? Impossible?

In the movie they detect a radio signal translating in prime numbers to show its unnatural occurrence. But embedded within is a TV signal. Embedded further are huge amounts of data which are blueprints for a machine.

Is any of this possible?

Answer 1

The biggest problem with that movie was its lame ending. It would have been much more satisfying if she'd told the skeptics at the end, "It doesn't matter what you believe. _They_ know that we're here. It's their move now."

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Paula said,

> It is far from elementary to even send a signal containing numbers.



And yet, we humans send signals containing numbers and much more. Somebody told me a long time ago that Mossad had once stolen the complete blueprints for a French fighter jet, and it was considered to be an amazing feat because it supposedly took five trucks to carry it all. I have no idea whether that story is true, but with today's technology, I can carry that much information in my pocket, and I could transmit it half way around the world in less than an hour.



> The aliens may or may not use a 10 base number system. We do, and we can't

> imagine another system.



Paula, You just imagined one. You could not have written that sentence without imagining one.



> At some point it would be necessary to learn the entire alien language. That's gonna

> be a nightmare without a tutor.



Hard, yes. Impossible, no. And that's the whole point of the story. The message was an intelligence test. The aliens broadcast their message out to the galaxy, and they hope to get a reply, but they don't want to talk to just anybody; They want to talk to somebody who has the intelligence, and the technological capability to decode the message and, to build the machine.

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@L.E. Gant,



I'm pretty sure Dr. Sagan wanted to transmit sequences of prime numbers. He thought it would be much less likely that the recipients of the message would think there could be any natural phenomenon that could transmit the primes.

Answer 2

In that story, the aliens didn't know who built the machine to send the signal, right?



I'm at a point in my life that I don't automatically think this or that is impossible. I've seen some incredible advances in types of surgery, medicines, and many other discoveries and inventions. I had extremely invasive kidney surgery when I was a child, and now that same surgery can be done with several tiny slits and electronics devices. There are medicines that make a fever blister disappear in less than a day. What I'm saying is that we need to expect the unexpected.



I think as we advance in technology and discovery, there will be new ways created to communicate, and translate if the need arises. I've wondered if it is a good idea to assume that nothing living is out there, simply because we don't have the means to "see" or "hear" what might be there. I think what is described in Sagan's book is a possible scenario.

Answer 3

Carl Sagan, who wrote the story before it got doctored for the screen, was a very good scientist. He helped set up SETI, and believed that, if there were aliens out there, they would try to make broadcasts that we could recognize as a universal pattern.



The simplest way of this happening would be in some form of binary numbers, 1, 11, 111, 1111, 11111, 111111, 1111111, 11111111, 111111111. The commas represent 'spaces' between the numbers, and then the same set repeated, with perhaps another pattern that would indicate a specific frequency of the EM spectrum to go to.



That indicated frequency would give a more complex message, probably something like a binary version of pi (to some 100 decimal digits, and another frequency indicator, with another message.



The thing is, it would take between 100 and 1000 of such "layers" to establish a method of communication between them and us, and it would be after that that a machine diagram would be feasible.



And Contact wasn't the first storyline with the idea of building a machine or getting contact - look up Fred Hoyle's "A for Andromeda" and the BBC serial and sequel that were based on the original.



So, is it possible? Yes. Maybe not the machine (which was more hollywood than technology), but the possibility of having a one-way communication from them to us.

Answer 4

Sending a detailed signal is at least possible - though there are issues of bandwidth and error-correction. The more efficiently a signal is coded, the more it looks like random noise, meaning it might be missed.



I've read stories where they send blocks of data which were the length of the product of 3 prime numbers - it was supposed to be a 3D object ( model, or video file). There are enough fundamental constants that mass, length, time etc. could be expressed in those terms, while maths is thought to be invariant across spacetime, if not across multiple universes.



We have done similar things with the Voyager recordings (messages to aliens)

Answer 5

No.

That is all crap.



It is far from elementary to even send a signal containing numbers.

The aliens may or may not use a 10 base number system.

We do.

And we can't imagine another system.

That does not mean aliens use it.



At some point it would be necessary to learn the entire alien language.

That's gonna be a nightmare without a tutor.

I'd say impossible.

It's going to need face to face meetings.

Answer 6

On Voyager, not only did we have a gold record with sounds, images and video recorded on it but we included instructions on how to build a player as a water mark on the phonograph. A phonograph was chosen as a simple technology that any technological society should understand. It's probably all messed up by micro-meteoroids by now.



Not necessarily something to do with an intent of being successful but a symbolic gesture in ceremony of an exploration venture.

Answer 7

A signal can be simple or complex; it's up to the sender to make it understandable, and it's up to the receiver to be able to decipher it... We send photographs back from space probes - some of it's black & white and not very detailed, some of it is in full living color and *very* detailed - but they take longer to send the more complex they get.



For instructions to be sent like those in 'Contact' - it would need to be a very *long* detailed signal. Taking weeks or months to transmit fully - then, hopefully, the receiver didn't *miss* any of it...

Answer 8

I believe the signal and the amount of data are indeed possible to be transmitted. As for the machine they built, I can't recall if it broke any laws of physics. It is certainly beyond our current technology and may indeed be science fiction.

Answer 9

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