I'm not bashing on you by this reply, Actual. I just want to point out something of the larger issue.
Keep this in mind.
Wall of Text Inbound:
Probably as Easy as It Looks:
Someone last night had an Elite .gif symbol for their thumbnail (NagualI think?). It shifts between a puffy super saturated over-simplified SNES image of the game to the present sexy, trim, seriousness of this one. The image we've received from the UP? That's very much the SNES sort of thing. It's absolutely nothing more than the bare minimum.
KISS... and Gratuitous: Keep it Simple Stupid
My name is actually a nod to Frontier's development process: 8Bits. Old computers "ate" data as often as they kept it. In a way, our attempts to solve this has been much of the same sort of behavior. If I wanted to do this I have fully access to my universities astronomy lab. It's a big university with a lot funding for this sort thing. I could punch up everything there is to know about the Pleiades and Merope into this thing. I'm sure whatever I got back would be VERY interesting without having to put any value judgement on that at all. You're right that people have some powerful tools on hand.
However, there's something to keep in mind:
It would be pointless. Carl Gauss found Ceres in 1801 by using the method of least squares:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares. All of us here are probably HOPING for a message as complicated as you're saying it is. In earnest deep down most of us know it is not. This isn't something like Cicada 3301. BluWolf pretty much eliminated all possibility of it even being much more complicated than: Drive, Park, Do.
Why all the Tin Foil Mad Hattery:
It's fun. It's a legitimate reason to get let your inner geek out to run around for a bit. Remember that scene in the Martian when Mark Watney has just returned from getting the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator)? He ran around in circles inside the hang waves his arms like a complete nut. This is the same thing an Explorer does after some weeks or months out in the black. The geek and nerd and dork and all the other things that gave us science has had its funding cut for most of our lives now. Big government and big money are increasingly conservative (Luddite -hats couldn't defecate in a toilet if someone didn't remind them where the bathroom was and its purpose). Today we have to go to museums to see a spacecraft. So, much of all this tin foil is just pure glee at being able to take our own little funding-cut corn of expertise and letting it run loose in the park for a bit. It's a child and it wants to play...
Some of the Tin Foil is Deliberate:
Yeah, this is obnoxious maybe, but it's true.
For example:
Good Example of Basic Signaling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REsp3Mzjcj8
1, 2, 3, (chatter) = Safe
1, 2, 3, (Here I am) ~ if interrupted the crow functions as a ‘lighthouse’ for itself and other animals familiar with it (most notably other crows). The interrupted 1, 2, 3 is like a function of timing. “You are here, I am here, and we are all together…” The crow knows where ‘you are’, where ‘it is’, and by stopping at 1, 2, 3, it can indicate your proximity to itself. It does this rhythmically.
If you watch the video you can see that at 0:08, 0:09, and 0:10 the craw makes a call. The call is the entire length of a second. Thus it ends on 0:11. There is then a pause from 0:12 to 0:15 … 0:12, 0:13, 0:14, 0:15 where upon at 0:16 it begins this again… 16 + 16 = 32. Don’t forget the 2 second pauses. 32 + 2 = 34. What’s this? The craw begins to “Chitter” at exactly that moment. Another 2 second pause and then a single call at 0:36 seconds. At exactly 16 seconds of silence later the entire thing begins anew with a 2 and then 2 caw pattern.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ all this above was to go into the citation section of me rambling some time back. It would have gone on to talk about
Trichoplusia ni, Oxalis tuberosa, Harmine,
Telepathine, Banisteriopsis caapi, the structure of Chitin, its coloration, geomagnetic fields, differences of chemicals in receptor cites in neurology
- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/files/2014/10/brain-networks.jpg
- https://thumbs.mic.com/ZWZkODE3MDk1...mdHlibGlwamE1bXBhNHBpM2VuYmVlcXFnZy5qcGc=.jpg
- http://image.slidesharecdn.com/cons...ntegrated-information-2-638.jpg?cb=1415201706
and concluded something like...
Summary I:
The capacity of the chitin to absorb and react to electronic, photonic, and geometric occlusions in its environment is co-composite with its capacity to facilitate the elucidation of such fields scalar to the influence of those fields upon it.
Summary II:
The capacity of animals to interact electively does not require nor elicit those conditions to which we might prefer.
Summary III:
The presence of their of the conditions and a capacities of summaries I and II defer favor to the notions that those common features possessed within a single organism whose orders may arrange – as to their function – a chemical nuance unlike our own are probable to have capacities which have not: these capacities would readily exceed our own simply in benefit of our want for them.
Conclusions and Implications:
1. Such a species, machine, or process warrants careful considerations where interaction and proximity is concerned.
2. Our elective ability to persuade, direct, or influence such alternative agencies (conscious or otherwise) present unknown problems imminently confrontational even where fortuitously benign.
It could all be relevant, but realistically? Nah. Not here. Not in a game. Real life? Ya, this would be all kinds of important. Here? The game is a wondrous powerful simulator, but
would be unfair if Frontier made this require you have gotten through calc III. That's suicide-worthy courses were they actually assign monitors to the class to be sure people aren't psychologically going to pop during the summer cram session. No, Frontier is has just Easter Egged some things which didn't have any puzzle to them. SO, we find all those first.
It's not Hyper Light Drifter:
Hyper Light Drifter is a great example of our situation. That game has LAYERS of HIDDEN lore in it. There's one level with walls and walls of coded text for you to let your inner geek just go mad: and not talking about the alphabet area for those that have played.
However, the main game is something basic, fun, and straight forwards. "First I gave you a pistol," says the game. "Now I have given you a laser lance that's twice as powerful and twice the range." ..."Okay says we," and with pistol set aside we run out to the first pylon we saw, clearly interactable, but twice the range of our best jump or pistol-shot. And... upon shooting it? ...The game permits a greater amount of complexity.
This is exactly what's going on with the UP. First it was the UA... Simple, but obtuse. Then it was the Barnacles... specific, definable, and obviously static (at least at that time). Now? Now we have something that plays with us: the UP.
This is a progression.
We'd failed at this fourth wall up to this point. The UA was a fairly simple thing and required no real actions on our part. It was merely a confirmer of those things already long suspected. The Barnacles were more like a tease. However, because humanity's only reliable action is self-destruction the Barnacles allowed us to restore damage caused by own maliciousness towards one another. The UP? The first thing I ever heard anyone say was, "Let's drop it in a station and see what happens when we honk it." ... Humanity is an incredibly stupid creature.
If I was a passing alien I'd class humanity as a "tool using animal" with a "consciousness rating" of about 15%... requisite for first-contact communications? 20%.
- Where does that place humanity? Same place we put ants: worthy of having their homes pumped full of liquid aluminum so we can have a fascinating replicate of the inside of their homes. The occupants weren't worth preserving.
Chemical Analysis Absent:
We can't really even do chemical analysis on these things. I mean, if we knew the fibers that go into whatever this barnacle is or the UAs and UPs we'd probably we able to identify the very star they came from. But we can't.
Why? Well, first because the simulator just can't do that. Even if this was a voxel game it'd not be able to do that. It'd be gigantic waste of resources. This is where we pass the forth-wall so people just don't bring it up. And that's one of the big reasons we get so much tin foil. The same is true in real life, really. Take Crop Circles for example? The fields have tiny metal particulates that rather suggest some field of high energy passed through the upper atmosphere, catching with it very fine particulates. As the energy passes down onto the planet it doesn't it the surface all at once. It hits sequentially. This creates the flattening of the pattern that will eventually lead some farming to beating the first child he sees that: board or no board. People prefer that it would be boards so we tell them it is a board and laugh at the New Agers. In private? Completely different story...
In Elite we try to assert that phyllotaxis is the shape of the barnacles: true-tin foil here. It's true, and it's tin foil. If it where phyllotaxis then we could say that sequences of three are involved: 1,2,3 would form a triangle with two tall legs, 1 & 2, 2 & 3, with the hypotenuse being ( 1 & 3) quite short. 4, 5, 6, would be the next triangle at about 88 degrees of the first, and so on. Maybe 24, 25, and 26 would complete it. The symbol of what's suspected to be Barnard's Loop within the area 20, 15, and 23.
This is too complex and Frontier would never do it.
So why do we?
Because we're over educated and not logical enough. We would rather have a lot of chaff and eliminate it only where necessary so as to not throw out anything potentially relevant and critical later. Also, saying something quite complicated can sometimes lead to an appropriate simplification. Usually this happens by someone other than the person who proposed the complicated idea.
So, it's not that this thing is terribly complicated. It's just that well:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
- H.P. Lovecraft
Do you really want us to assemble it all in a day?
Here's a few ways of looking this:
1. Is going on a vacation to the beach THE BEACH?
2. Is it the journey to get there?
3. Is the memories afterwards and experiences shared?
Another way to look at it:
This could be Guild Wars 2 where all the developers can manage to do is add another map with the same content as the last map.
This kind of puzzle Frontier has left us generates community. Notice most people aren't flaming on one another in here too. This despite that we've been at this... quite a darn while. That just shows how well Frontier has done in making this game. Maybe it was that you had to use your brain-thing to play the game in the first place: it doesn't hand you any real hints on how to turn it on. IF you can learn to play then you're going to have one of the best gaming experience of this or any decade.
So, it's a choice... drooling idiots that rage and bite at everything or anything... or ...this.
I'll take this. I'll take this for years and years and years...
And keep in mind the romance of a mystery is the mystery itself. Not all stories need an answer nor do they need to complete.
We'll solve this thing. Probably in some off-hand accidental way we've already tried. Again, BluWolf's image of the dashboard awhile back. Such a "duh" statement probably no one wanted to point it out for fear of ridicule. Maximillion awhile back was asking for pictures of Merope for probably similar reasons; to calculate orbits. And numerous others have as well. The benefit of BluWolf's thinking is that it comes with the bonus that his location image also suggests where to test it: not just that it can be tested.
So, the solution is right here among us.
