The greatest discovery of all time

[SirUlli]

The chances are there's life out there, but any messages could be thousands of years old and indecipherable. Roger Highfield reports
...
Aliens are probably common. Because there are billions of trillions of stars in the cosmos, many astronomers think it would be highly improbable for Earth to be the only rock to harbour life.

Whether ET is intelligent is still hotly debated. But no one doubts that the receipt of a signal from another civilisation would be Earth-shattering. "It would surely be the greatest discovery of all time, eclipsing the findings of Newton, Dawin and Einstein combined," says Prof Paul Davies, a British cosmologist from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University.
...

full Story

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/conn...=/connected/2005/10/05/ixconnrite.html

very interestink

btw

Dr. Seth Shostak

Sir Ulli

 

[Jeff7]

That bit about the message being indecipherable is concerning, and probably would be true. We still can't translate some languages of our own ancestors, and we've got all kinds of cultural ruins to analyze for context. Granted, a message may be crafted so that it is "easy" to translate, but what's easy for one species that counts in trinary, sees in a totally different set of wavelengths, and has 4 arms might not be intuitive for us.
A message nonetheless would still be an incredible discovery.

 

[networkman]

The aliens may well be "alien" to us as far as their concepts, language, anatomy, perceptions, etc.

However, the universe is still the same - laws of physics still apply. Elements such as hydrogen and helium are plentiful regardless of location. Pi is still Pi no matter where you are. I would postulate that any alien civilization attempting to craft an "easy" message would work with the lowest common denominators in putting something together. Our job would be to recognize the message and interpret what was encoded into it. Of course, there may still be some "basic concepts" that we haven't yet grasped that may make it difficult to translate. 😉

 

[Soggysocks]

Originally posted by: networkman
The aliens may well be "alien" to us as far as their concepts, language, anatomy, perceptions, etc.

However, the universe is still the same - laws of physics still apply. Elements such as hydrogen and helium are plentiful regardless of location. Pi is still Pi no matter where you are. I would postulate that any alien civilization attempting to craft an "easy" message would work with the lowest common denominators in putting something together. Our job would be to recognize the message and interpret what was encoded into it. Of course, there may still be some "basic concepts" that we haven't yet grasped that may make it difficult to translate. 😉

I agree with you here. And if we could learn to communicate with a few of the other spiecies on our own planet...E.G. Dolpins, Wales or Simians ....then maybe we would or could understand and decipher signals from other worlds and cultures.