Question

If you recently returned from mars and your next project is to assist in developing a space probe that will go out in search of extra terrestrial life. Your task is to decide what selection of items should be included on that probe that gives the aliens some idea of what Earth and human are like. pick 5 items that you would include on that space probe, and explain why you'd include those things. Please keep in mind that that you have to consider things such as language barrier or use of devices that aliens might not be fimiliar with such as (usb devices/chargers)

Answer 1

note just for curiosity ,in fact on voyager 1 a gold foil was sent which contained lot of information about earth like 104 image of people , sounds of natural things , greerting in all majors language and so on

we don;t know anything about physiology of aliens humans are visual creatures but we can;t expect the same for aliens but it is resonable to assume that they will somethings like hand to touch , evaluate its shape , size , and to sense its temperature so we send list that can be read by touching it , as well as seeing it

now here is my list

1. a tablet that contain list of prime upto numbers in dotted form (like braile language ) like this

*

**

***

*****

*******

and so on upto 100

reason. all intelligent creatures love recognising pattern and sequence of prime numbers are one of the most fundamental pattern so they will recognise it , it is also known that all intelligent creatures are curious .such a long sequence of prime number will incite thier curiosity and also make them think that it can't be random ,it will serve as a guide for them to study other object that we will send

2. a sample of earth most common soil

reason: once the aliens are curious about us they can study our soil for its constituents , bacteria present in it , water content it would give them so much information about earth atomsphere and life form present of earth

3. a tablet that explains our decimal numbers and its fundamental properties , mathemecal symbol mainpulation rules , rotations

reason: it is important to establish the common language between human and aliens others wise we can't convey our massage this tablet will give them some knowledge on how understand our messeges

4. a highly compressed massege written in decimal form and how to decode that in decimal form

reason:we don;t have luxury to send them lot of things and it is has be simple and it should not perish in millions of years , metal tablets are good eg of it ,

a=01, .. z=26

and then i say expand 123^345245 and substitute the previous values and this way i can send them a book with few lines of work with lot of information available to them we can teach them about imports and any other messege we want to convey

5. a picture of us sending the space craft

reason: it is unlikly that if aliens didn't understood our previous tablet , they would be able to sense what this picture is all about , but if they did understood our first four messeges then they would be able to see that we want to connect with them and that's why we have sent this spacecraft