Showing Off to the Universe: Beacons for the Afterlife of Our Civilization

I really like the subtle emphasis on traditional engineering, whereby we tend to use the simplest methods to produce something predictable, and can therefore recognize it as "unnatural". It ignites the imagination to think of what an unpredictable, "natural" engineering scheme may produce for us in terms of beauty or unexpected utility. For example, I always thought it best to learn outdoors and that 90-degree angles hinder me, they make me anxious and tense. What about a classroom with smooth, round edges, walls of varying but somehow synergistic colors schemes, and beams of varying lengths, textures, and widths, like what you'd see in a natural setting? All precisely calculated and predictable, but the effect would be abstractly beautiful rather than concretely unexpected.

When I was a kid I lived on a street with a hill and field and some very large deciduous trees growing out back. There was a windstorm in summer that broke off entire limbs from these trees which collected in a loose pile by the trunks. The branches fell in such a way that you could go inside the pile, like a little hut. The neighborhood kids and I moved some around and made a more secure version, but the base structure was the same. It inspired us greatly, I think we slept out there for two days.

So only a little off topic, but does anyone here use the Wolfram language and Mathematica for research and common coding tasks? I've been pleasantly surprised so far with the depth of the language (the import statement is a single unified way to import everything from CSV, text, excel files, mathematical optimization (.mps) files, graphviz dot files...etc). I'm just starting to use it and the fact that you can wrap a oneliner in a single command to turn it into an interactive widget with a slider, or convert it to C code, JIT it, or run it in parallel or on a GPU is crazily well integrated. I love python (open source and free instead of proprietary and expensive), but in Python every one of those things is a separate library if it exists. I've always known about Cython/Jython/PyPy, but that requires a lot more effort to utilize in the same way.

>>Should we think of this “piscifact” as some great achievement of puffer fish civilization, that should be celebrated throughout the solar system?

Well I for one am very proud of that little pufferfish and wish him the best and would definitely put it on the fridge if iwashis mother.

(It's a thing male pufferfish do to attract a mate, I'm not just using 'him' as generic pronoun, also pufferfish are adorable and super cool and you should fall down the Wikipedia hole if you have an hour)

It's just an example, but this comment:

> Then there are cases where it’s not even clear whether something represents a language. An example is the quipus of Peru—that presumably recorded “data” of some kind, but that might or might not have recorded something we’d usually call a language

is slightly out of date: As of December, at least some khipus have been shown to exactly match with Spanish census documents!

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/khipus-inca-empire-har...

So there's a dead comment pointing out the cartoonish predictably of Wolfram's self-promotion which yeah that's definitely in the article--which includes at least two extended talks about cellular automata for example followed by short dismissals of them for the purpose-- however having hate-read a lot of Wolfram's articles: this one actually grapples with the topic where most of his articles are simply "Mathematica is the solution".

> There’ve been other messages sent, including a Doritos ad, a Beatles song, some Craigslist pages and a plant gene sequence—as well as some arguably downright embarrassing “artworks”.

He seems to refer to:

"Joe Davis is an artist and a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the mid-1980s, he became concerned that no image of humans had been sent into space representing the details of human genitals or reproduction. So he led a project to transmit the sounds of vaginal contractions towards neighbouring star systems. To do so, he recorded the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers."

There's nothing "downright embarrassing" in sending these sounds, and sending them isn't conceptually different than sending all other "samples" mentioned in the whole article.

It just tells something about Stephen Wolfram (and others who share his evaluation of that).

Take a coherent ray of light, shine it with Morse code encoded information on the green zone of a star systems predicted planets position, ahead of time. Repeat with a realistic rhythm of generations.

The best beacon is a automated light house.

Hacker News Community, 4 out of 8 comments as it stand is basically a longer version of "Stephen Wolfram is a narcissist".

This is pretty poor form, if not for the fact that it is a cliché critique, because it fails to consider that Stephen is a businessman and it is natural to promote his work and businesses by extension.