1y ago

If you were tasked with putting together a message to send to space aliens, with the only restriction that the message had to be under 4GB, what would you send?

77 comments

4GB is an absolute fuck ton of text. Like, solid chunk of Wikipedia would fit in there.
- If you were restricted to just 700MM words, what would you say?
  
  Help. That’s it, that’s all I’d say
  
  Probably just send them the encyclopedia brittanica
- the other day I learned you can download Wikipedia and it's something like 50 GB of text plus 50 GB of pictures
  
  A few years ago (~2010) I had the entire German Wikipedia on my 8gb iPod touch. It was only about 4gb in size without media.
- So you send them text that they can't read?
  
  I don't think you appreciate how much text you can fit into 4GB. The first entire gigabyte could be dedicated to various means of translation and explaining our language system, and you'd still have a 500 million words left after that.

I would first find some big names from the demo scene and say "I am not worthy, let these folks do it" and anyone who disagreed would have their frontal lobes severed or something.
This, in its original form, was 4kb.
So, none of us are worthy. Unless one of you is on Lemmy.
Edit: this one is 1kb lmao. None of us are worthy.
- Can you tell me a little more about these? What is the “demo scene,” how were they made, and why were they made?
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
  It's as rad as it could possibly be.
  Wouldn't be surprised at all if anyone from that scene lurks on lemmy.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  4kb
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

A link with a cracked Minecraft client and an ip to join to a small server to chill with that alien.
Technically you can probably send a bunch of links, like Wikipedia etc. He "just" needs to access to it, which may or may not breach the 4GB rule.
- Damn, what a cheapskate. A chance to play Minecraft with a friendly space alien and you can’t even pay for a legit copy. Probably going to give that alien a computer virus and doom us all. Don’t put this guy in charge.
  
  Can agree with that, but I wanted to save the alien from having a Microsoft account.
  
  Nah, they're going to give the alien an Alienware !
- Why do you assume the alien has access to the internet?
  
  No reason at all. Of course probably the aliens won't have access to the interwebz, but playing Minecraft with an alien sounded funny in my head.
- It won't breach the 4GB rule, but even the closest star to Sol would have at minimum latency of 4 years.
  
  Yeah that's true.

Rickroll, comeon

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the actual messages humanity has sent into space in the hopes that aliens will hear it since those are actually pretty cool.
I mean look at this crap. Look at how cool it looks. https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.pdf
(I'm on mobile otherwise I'd add a picture)
- https://www.plover.com/misc/Dumas-Dutil/messages.pdf
  Again a cringe Word PDF title (why cant this program use normal Titles?)
  Why tf didnt they just draw our numbers and instead some crazy art stuff?
  
  It's explained in the PDF. If they used normal numbers and letters, the chance of corruption would be high. So they had to reform into the symbols you see.
  I still don't get why we use Pi instead of Tau though, when most equations double it up into Tau anyway.
- The dimension (physical height, 5'9") of an average man (blue/white)
  Well thanks now they think we are all men
- It's kinda cool but not sure why they thought creating a new set of pictograms that aren't used on Earth was the best method
  https://xkcd.com/927/
  
  So that the symbols would be less likely to get corrupted if the aliens received it over a bad radio link

 undefined

        This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

    Sending this message was important to us. We considered (emphasis on 'considered') ourselves to be a powerful culture.

    This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

    What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

    The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

    The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

    The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

    The form of the danger is an species of great apes.

    The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

I would probably include an apology for using FAT32 and insist that we've made better filesystems since then.

rickroll at 8k for however many seconds that is
- Rick rolled until the heat death of the universe

Probably an AI model that fits in that size. It might not be our best models, but it probably would be a lot more useful to aliens than whatever we'd decide to fit on 4GB.
They'd get mostly all the inner workings of our languages and how we do conversations and generally be able to answer basic questions about humanity.
- What ? "an AI model" is not a compression algorithm. Why give the aliens an AI trained with some wikipedia articles when you could just give them wikipedia.
  
  Because an LLM is more than just data: it's like a big network of how syllables and words go together based on some context. And that's useful because language is how we communicate, how we connect ideas together, it's how we share stories. It's not just Wikipedia articles, it's a database of relationships between words and concepts. It approximates how we think as humans.
  Yes, AI is hella overhyped. Everyone wants to AI everything. But really for this particular situation, I think the model data would actually be the best precompiled database of knowledge we can possibly provide to learn about humans for the size.
  No it's not magic compression, but 4GB worth of parameters is still a lot. GPT4All has models just under 4GB. They're not particularly impressive compared to OpenAI's offerings, but I think you can extract a lot more practical information to do first contact out of a basic model than 4GB worth of Wikipedia. It's extremely lossy compression, it's never gonna spit out articles vebatim, it will hallucinate a ton of stuff.
  If we had more space I'd send all the major AIs we have like Dall-E, LLaMa and GPT 4. Imagine you're an alien, you're presented with a keyboard and a monitor, and know nothing about us. You can use Dall-E to try random letters and words and see if the output makes sense. Maybe you find out what a cat, dog, bat, frog, apple looks like. You can then input those words in ChatGPT, and get context as to when those are used. What's "a horse"? What's "riding"? Put those into Dall-E, now you know what a "cat riding a horse" looks like. It can generate as many as you want, any combination. Eventually you can figure out how to ask ChatGPT if cats typically ride horses, cars, bycles, what do cats do.
  Now imagine you're a very advanced alien species that can easily process the model's parameters. You've just downloaded the basics of humanity. They can map their language to our model's parameters, and basically speak to us in our language, and translate our answers to theirs, and basically have a basic conversation.
- AIs do a lot of different things. What kind of AI do you mean?
  
  stable diffusion trained off of gay furry porn

The warning "This species destroys anything it encounters, turn around, save yourselves, warn the universe". With as many before and after images of destroyed habitats and extinct creatures that would fit in the rest of the 4GB space.
- Hell I'd love that pitch for a tv series
  
  I am sure a TV series would get destroyed.

Intheend.exe from limewire

I’d send a small note saying “Please take me away from here.”

"Stay away" with various methods given to understand the meaning of the words (images, signs, numbers, sounds, etc)

Garf

2 girls 1 cup

We must send them the historical documents so they can work to achieve the perfect society.

An ASCII image that says "Help."

Frank Sinatra - stormy weather
the English Wikipedia articles on codecs, the 7 layer model, semiconductors, and microprocessors.
gcc compiler.
the source code for Firefox and the lightest possible Linux environment to run it... ... ...
and then as many axxo rips as I can cram in, sorted by IMDb rating

asl?
- I imagine sign language would be much less information dense than text, as it would have to be pictures. And they may not even understand the sign language.
  
  I think they meant "age/sex/location?" which was a common first question when getting to know someone online when instant messengers as a concept were novel
  
  18 f cali

A really long pocket call

Undertale 😎

onenightinparis.mov

A history of all of our misdeeds and self-inflicted suffering, probably 1gb of compressed literature and 3gb of imagery and video, along with an Earnest plea:
Please if you are able, either teach us how to save us from ourselves, or be merciful and destroy us. Don't let this self-inflicted carnage of we barely sapient creatures commit on one another due to lack of meaningful intellect or empathy continue.
Either take our hand and teach us as the confused, selfish, irrational children that we are, or just end this evolutionary mistake.