Re: How do you say 'Hello' to an alien?

Quoting Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>:

> Nikhil Sinha wrote:
> >They may, however, understand numbers.
> >
> >
>
> Only if we somehow predifined them. Which was the point of the numbers
> on the top of the Arecibo thing, but I don't think the predefinition is
> useful: which way is up? is 0 in there somewhere? It's only a piece of a
> complicated and possibly meaningless puzzle, not in any way a key.
I think the compositors of the Arecibo message assumed any repicients would be
familiar with binary notation, and therefore likely to recognize it. I shan't
try to guess the odds of an alien civilization as a whole being acquainted to
binary numbers, but merely pessimistically note that positional notation seems
to come anything but naturally to many humans I know.

                                                             Andreas

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