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Comment by adrianonantua | Hacker News Reader

"In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages"

Oh, man, what will they think of us now? Couldn't we have sent Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and similar content?

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Reminds me of the scene in Contact when they realize that the signal is a video of Adolf Hitler making an address.

What's more ridiculous is the assumption that other life forms may somehow understand the messages we send them in our own language. It's so preposterous I don't even know where to begin.

What do you suppose we beam to them other than our codified way of communicating? You can only hope they could potentially decipher it to grok some meaning.

>What do you suppose we beam to them other than our codified way of communicating?

Something mathematically-based?

How can they even hope to decipher something which is language/culture based ? We even hard a seriously hard time to understand egyptian hieroglyphs (on Earth! From a culture we knew of from many other texts in Antiquity!) until we found a stone where the text was translated into something intelligible. If they have no reference, all communication we send them will seem like garbage to them. Assuming anything else would be foolish.

Maybe, just maybe, this is done more for the authors of those 10k tweets rather than any potential extraterrestrials.

I love the messages we sent in Voyager 1 and 2 - they were quite capable of explaining our methods of communication.

Yeah, so capable, that most people on Earth would not be able to decipher them. You must be joking, seriously.

It was more of a ceremonial thing that a practical attempt to communicate with aliens. However they would be able to infer a lot of information from them, albeit not fully translate it. Reminds me of That Alien Message (http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/).

The tweets must have been specific replies. They probably weren't just sending a random popular hash tag or something.

But if they were random, now the universe knows about twibbons and Kony.

They sent tweets? Oh jesus.

Not only do have to worry about whether there is intelligent life to receive our message, or whether they understand it, but we also have to worry about the certainty that they will now either be hostile, or else not very intelligent...

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