Alright...
In the light of MB's last comments I've convinced myself of the following. I'd appreciate if you scrutinize the logic and comment on it.
1- The UA and UP are from the same manufacturer.
2- The UA using Morse and drawing the ship is separate from its pointing to Merope. It uses Morse because it's from someone who knows who and what we are and wants to make sure we understand it is communicating with us. Pointing to Merope is because it wants us to know something important is in Merope.
3- The UP is the second step of the message, it points to Merope 5C, somewhere more specific. It no longer needs to use Morse because it knows it has our attention so speaks more directly, in the form of a spectogram. It disables our ship systems because it wants us to understand what it's telling us is a warning so we better listen.
These made me come to the conclusion that something sinister is brewing on or in Merope 5C, or it will arrive there sometime in the near future and someone is trying to warn us of the danger beforehand.
The Feds have figured out about as much and are trying to understand further by sending capital ships there, showing they are taking the warning seriously. They are looking at barnacles because they are the only interesting thing to find there and they want to hit two birds with one stone, further MA research while patrolling the area for a possible threat.
So, my very own guess is the threat isn't there yet, the UA and UP are a two step warning and the spectogram is the key to setup our defenses before the attack.
This leads me to believe the image and the symbols around it is some kind of galactic position based calendar, which if we position right, will let us know the exact time the danger will come depending on the positioning of certain celestial objects. Merope and Merope 5C are the best starting points to try to match things up.
Am I just talking nonsense or do you think this line of thinking has any merit?
A very interesting idea: that the message contains temporal information as well as positional. How would you communicate a calendar, or a specific moment in time to another civilisation? The alignment of the primary star, Merope 5 and the moons 5a and 5b might be used together to convey a particular moment but that would be tricky for us to work out (how accurate are the angles shown in the diagram? It could be due tonight or in a year's time or next century).
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I'm not sure what the purpose would be to giving us a date, unless there is something that happens periodically that the sender of the message wants to draw our attention to (e.g. telling us that the Barnacle-makers send a ship at this time to harvest the meta-alloys themselves). Also, whilst I feel the message is intended for us, specifically, I'm not sure the UPs or the UAs were built solely for our use: the UAs seem more like an early-warning system or boundary/navigational marker, whilst the UPs point directly at Merope 5c, implying that there is something there that defines their purpose. I spent half an hour in Merope 5c orbital cruise several weeks ago looking for signal sources, hoping to find a free-floating UP, as this seems to me the most logical place for them to be, but saw no signal sources at all.
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My main concern about the message being a map to surface co-ordinates is that there does not seem to be an unambiguous way to get a single, reasonably precise (sufficient to find with a fly-by or SRV trip) surface location from the message - being able to transmit a message with an image would imply the capability to show surface features indicating a location, if that were the intent. What we have looks like a broad description of a world, possibly with quadrants being labelled, but nothing recognisable as Merope 5c but for the fact the UPs point at it. I still feel that the message is drawing our attention to something (a 'come to this location' signal) but I have no idea how to interpret it to get the required positional information that would be required. If I were wanting to give surface co-ordinates to another civilisation, I would need to specify a meridian based on surface features and latitude/longitude (probably relative to the circumference), or use polar co-ordinates based on angle from the pole and a meridian and distance. I don't see any surface details and whilst the lower-right diagonal line might represent a meridian, I don't see how this is defined.
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With all the people analysing this, I would think that if there were surface co-ordinates specified by the image, someone would have found a way of extracting it by now, so perhaps we're looking at it all wrong. How many ways can you interpret a sphere with a few markings around the edge?
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Side-note: I still don't think we've found all the nebulae with Barnacles in but I'm not sure that Barnacles are related to the UP/UA mystery. I don't think the UP is telling us to stop shooting them. It might even be a coincidence, a red herring, that Barnacles are on 5c at all and that the reason the UAs and UPs direct us there has nothing to do with them whatsoever. It's not like the Barnacles on Merope 5c have alien bases built around them and alien vehicles mining them all the time. If there's an outpost of the 'Missing' or anyone else on 5c, then they are well away from the Barnacles and avoid them - and
that might not be a coincidence.
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Apologies for the long post, well done if you read it all - I'm just trying to give people ideas by thinking it through!
