Alien archaeology and other mysteries: Breaking News, Theories and Tinfoil Hattery
- Thread starter Ozric
- Start date
This keeps coming up and it is incorrect. Morse is not English or even a language. A code is not an alphabet or a word list. It is a shorthand, for efficiency in transmitting. There is no 1=1 correspondence with sounds, figures or anything else. Morse groupings stand for groups of words and sentences.
There's a great example of this in the Navajo code-talkers of WWII, or the Cherokee and Choctaw code-talkers in WWI. Their messages might/could be deciphered after some difficulty. Say the message is "spotted pony woman drums" and is deciphered. However, that message gives no information to anyone but a Navajo, because the word-group "spotted pony woman drums" links to a specific cultural knowledge mostly unknown to anyone who was not raised Navajo.
Ciphers Vs Code [Khan Academy]
Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary
REVISED 15 JUNE 1945
(DECLASSIFIED UNDER DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE DIRECTIVE 5200.9)
OK I NEED to see this! (goes a-googlin')
Just wanted to throw in a speculation from a scientist, who made it to show that there are more ways of thinking about something than accepted scientific canon (ultimately, Asimov said he didn't believe it either, but his point was made).
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Could come up with plenty of plausible explanations. The wavelengths we observe as red correspond to the lowest end of the blackbody spectrum visible to us, and objects hot enough to emit them are dangerous to touch. The range of the EM spectrum that's considered "visible" to an unrelated alien species will probably be different than ours, but it's not unreasonable to think they'd evolve "danger" associations for wavelengths that signify some temperature threshold.
Not sure if this applies so much on ammonia worlds, but in any oxygen atmosphere at least, fire should be pretty similar in color....
EDIT: to be clear, you could probably use a similar reasoning to explain why a species might associate green or blue with danger instead... My point is mostly that it probably doesn't tell us much about the question of common ancestry.
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Yes, and +rep.
Even though I've never eaten a piece of blue meat (seen them though) my whole body screams "BAD! DANGER" when I see one. Blue things are, for the most part, unedible/sickening to a human. Don't ask me to explain what's wrong with people who eat bleu cheese :/
You're right, but I think it's a bit beside the point. People here tend to say "Morse" when they really mean "Morse-encoded English", which is what the Thargoids are using. I.e. they're using both a human cipher (Morse) and a human language (English). Because Morse was developed for low-bandwidth communications it has in the past also been used with codes. But "Morse code" itself is not actually a code, it's essentially a simple substitution cipher as each unencrypted letter or symbol is translated into a unique, consistent pattern of Morse. The Thargoids are not using a code with their Morse, however.
The piece you quoted from Thatchinho was a response to Moribus saying "it's stunningly unlikely we'll encounter sentient insectiod aliens that talk in morse code too, so there's some narrative lattitude given to Elite Dangerous game genetics". Moribus seems to be assuming that Thargoids developed Morse encoded English independently. Thatchinho (correctly) pointed out that the Thargoids may have learned Morse and English from observing humanity. I think that's almost certainly correct given how common nav beacons are in the galaxy and the fact that the UA initially mimicked the nav beacon behaviour exactly.
I think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying bud. Either that or the old Nokia 'new message' notification tone was never actually saying 'SMS'
Pretty certain I've never said morse is a language, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on that front.
An alphabet or word list could form the basis of a code - all it needs to do is to say what each letter or word is code for. Similarly for a list of phrases.
When you're talking about there not being a 1=1 correspondence are you talking about inherent correspondence? If so, no dispute on that, and I never said there was an inherent correspondence. The correspondence is just whatever set of conventions are used.
I'm really not sure what to make of that point combined with your following point about morse groupings standing for words and sentences though.
I've always understood that standard morse code had each letter of the latin alphabet, the digits 0-9, and several extra characters, each one of which was represented by a specific pattern of dots and dashes. (And that the selection of pattern for letter was based on efficiency and so the simplicity of the pattern was in inverse proportion to the frequency of a letter being used in English - so the more often a letter was used, the simpler the pattern, hence e = . t = - i = .. and so on.
Are you saying none of that's correct? (I'm not saying that in an accusatory tone btw, I'm just genuinely unclear what you're meaning!
)Or are you talking about the stuff that's essentially communication protocol instructions - wait, understood, etc.? They don't invalidate the code for letters etc. though...
My point anyway was not about how things are, but how they might appear to be to an alien species.
Consider for example if we have beacons in a groups of systems (let's say the Pleiades Sector, for no particular reason
) and those beacons regularly transmit the following in morse "Start-<System Name>-<Date>-<Time>-<Status>-Stop". This will result in various patterns of dots and dashes.Given enough time surveying the messages, they will realise that some of the pattern never changes, some of the pattern changes by time and some of it changes according to the system. And hey presto! - they'd be able to identify our system names in morse code.
It doesn't matter what the code is, what language it translates back to or anything like that, each system would still have a unique pattern of dots and dashes and it's those specific patterns that they'd identify as the system names
My other point here is that they would not necessarily realise that what they were hearing was a code rather than our native language.
If the descriptions are accurate then they wouldn't have lungs and so wouldn't be able to talk in the way we do, and our speech might not even be recognisable to them as form of language. They would however communicate themselves via clacking their chelicrae together. Imagine if your means of communication was by clicking your fingers - would you be able to get the same range of sounds from that as you do when speaking? Or would you be able to get only a very small number of sounds, and then communicate via patterns of those sounds?
Now imagine your finger-click patterns were the only audio representation of language that you knew (because your species doesn't have lungs/windpipes/vocal cords/etc. and so can't speak).
You now hear someone speaking and you hear some morse - which ones sounds like a language to you?
(In the beacon scenario above, they'd also be able to work how our dates and times corresponded to their own measurements of time, and the might even be able to take a stab at the likely origins of our measurements of time. That's a bit of an aside from the main point though!
)
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I've read a lot of Asimov and there's some great works in there, I don't remember anything about human origins though. I've heard good things about some of the others.
Don't get me started on Hoyle though, for all his great work in other fields, he talked some utter utter balls about evolution and the origins of life.
Yeah, that would be my conclusion if this were real life data. Ie that Ram Tah is wrong. There are reasons silicon based life etc is a lot less likely to form than carbon based.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
Although our biochemistry seems and is complicated, many of the solutions that allow life to work on earth are probably just be the lowest energy solutions to problems that are going to be common to all life universally. And a function of elemental abundances which are thought to be pretty uniform throughout observable space. So we don't expect to see platinum or diamond carbon based life because those materials are not abundant and not a good basis for allowing lots of chemical reactions to happen by chance over long periods of time. Common problems in all living things include for example how to harvest energy, how to do heredity, and may only have a few solutions given what any planet would be starting with. Heck you can make nucleic acids in a test tube starting with much less complex material if you add heat and time. So while DNA is structurally complex in a cell, it can form spontaneously under the right conditions. Histones etc would have to come later, but you get the idea.
I know it seems simple minded or not very creative, but a lot of better minds than mine have thought a lot about this issue and most serious scientists are starting to think that a lot of what we see in life on earth may be mirrored elsewhere if we ever find it. Which I hope we do, a success at SETI is the thing I'd most like to see in my lifetime. The implications are just so profound.
Verner Vinge is relevant to the issues discussed here too. A Fire Upon the Deep gives a great description of a hypothetical alien species. Most of his work is heavy in first contact scenarios.
And I agree that Diaspora is amazing, one of the best books I've read. I still remember the sense of mind=blown from the opening chapter.
Lol, vrep!
Idk what kind of story progressions FD has planned in HIP 18778, but I guess they must involve the Thargoids trapping Canonn outside the normal dimensions of the ED universe....
By which I mean, it sounds like everyone docked on the Gnosis when it jumped to HIP 18778 is having the same CTD I'm getting when I try to log in... and so is someone who tried jumping in to the system after hearing of this.
Only explanation is the system has been turned into a trap to remove scientists from the galaxy!
By which I mean, it sounds like everyone docked on the Gnosis when it jumped to HIP 18778 is having the same CTD I'm getting when I try to log in... and so is someone who tried jumping in to the system after hearing of this.
Only explanation is the system has been turned into a trap to remove scientists from the galaxy!
The Thargoids are here for the biscuits.
[Wild-west-style drawl]
....well....
...they ain't gittin 'em...
(spit)
[/Wild-west-style drawl]
Always happy to provide some entertainment
I've only just tried to get in after the jump and it's working for me.
never fear while there is a Misfit in the galaxy, science is safe from those thargoid priests lol.
MSR we aim to misbehave for science and the galactic good, since June 3303