SETI Message

Posted on April 6, 2011 | 1 Comment

Can you decode the following extraterrestrial message? Is it real or fake? How can you tell?

 

SETI.wav Listen on Posterous
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One Response to SETI Message

  1. josh g. | April 10, 2011 at 12:59 pm | Reply

    Depending on which sound is 0 and which is 1, I get the following:
    01010000101101000110101011010101000

    35 digits doesn’t give me a clear clue as to where to break the sequence up into smaller subsets, if in fact that is required. There are doubles of either digit so neither one seems to be just a separator (unless, say, we’re counting sets of 0′s and a double 1 means zero 0′s). So, probably not Carl Sagan’s sequence of primes or anything like that.

    Probably I should check if this is morse code for something (in which case it would *definitely* be fake, as extraterrestrial intelligences would have no reason to use morse code… unless we were willing to believe that they received prior morse code signals and managed to resolve what they meant without having any other prior knowledge of our alphabet or language). …hmm, doesn’t seem to be though?

    Of course there’s the bigger question of how this radio signal was sonified, and whether the original signal actually incorporated very Western-sounding harmonies that I’m hearing in that second sound. But maybe that’s getting a bit too real. :)

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