Wouldn't it be lovely to make contact with another civilization
that has arisen and evolved independently.
Well, one thing you'd have to do first is to be sure you can understand the message.
Why should we expect that beings that are very different,
evolved in a different place, different period of time for their evolution,
should be able to send us a message that we can understand.
And the reason that I think that's likely
is that they live in the same universe as we,
they must deal with the same laws of physics and chemistry
and astronomy as we.
To test the idea that a signal could be understood,
we did a little experiment – we can only use human beings,
it's too bad I wish we could use some other intelligent beings
to make such an experiment, but we're restricted to people
they're the only ones we know about.
and so what we did
was to devise a complicated message, which you can see here,
of zeros and ones.
The zero and one might be a long and a short radio beep, you know,
[BEEPS]
Or it might be two frequencies,
[BEEPS]
Might be many things. But it's a language of two letters,
And you can see there's an enormous number of zeros and ones,
in fact 27,000 and something of them.
You can't tell just by looking at it, oh my goodness I see what this is,
you have to think about it.
Now the key to this is that the total number of zeros and ones
is 31 times 31 times 31, 31 cubed,
and it suggests that it's a pictorial message in 3 dimensions .
And if we were to write it in a sequence of 31 symbols
then go to the next line,
Then you see it starts getting a remarkable regularity.
And so what we did
is to give this message, not made simple in that way,
to some graduate students of mine at Cornell University
they were told nothing about what was in it, how to decode it,
and their job was to figure out what it said.
And here they are describing the the process they went through
to figure out what the message was about.
These are all graduate students of mine who are reasonably clever
But none of them work on this particular problem.
Well we gathered together in the the Mars room
and stared at it, and cursed volubly at length
Kathy noticed that 31 divided into 27 thousand... 29 thousand
seven hundred and ninety one, and it was determined that the remainder,
961, was 31 squared which left us with a 31 by 31 by 31 sequence
And then we sat together six of us for hours transcribing zeros and ones,
screaming and shouting from one office to the next
and complaining about the typographical errors
until we could get the sequence which is shown in the frames there.
They were making good progress, they found some errors in the transcription
of this that the BBC had made in fact,
but they figured out how to get around that.
It was not necessarily a three dimensional model at first,
it could have been a movie, because what eventually turned out to be
the corner markers of the cube,
and the lines which drew the pattern of the cube
could have been just frame markers for movie or a slideshow
it could have been separate frames .
And it was only when we had drawn them out and looked at them
that it became very uncertain whether it was anything like that.
– Since it was a dull movie you figured it was really three dimensional?
– That's about the size of it.
So, here we have some Plexiglas things.
A 'one' will be represented by a black square,
And a 'zero' by a transparent square.
Here's a whole sequence of transparent squares
that represent a sequence of zeros.
Now building up as the message requires,
the first space is a one which is black, second space another one which is black
third space another one which is black,
and in fact it's black one's all the way across the top line.
So top line there is a sequence of black ones.
Next line begins with a black one but then there's a sequence of zeros
represented by the transparent markers, and then a one at the end.
Now we have the similar pattern building up,
black edge, transparent interior, which goes for a number of lines further
Now the next line is different, it starts out with a one,
has a sequence of zeros and then there are three ones in the middle.
Then the same sequence of zeros and then a one.
So here is the black one at the periphery,
then here are the zeros, next are the three black ones
And then there will be zeros and a black one there,
and the remainder of this frame fills in like this.
So we now see the picture is a black border
and a kind of maltese cross in the middle
and everything else blank.
And there are many other layers and when we build them all up
we result in a pattern which we will shortly see
And that is the answer.
We can tell this is the right answer because of how regular
the geometry is, it couldn't have gotten that by accident.
So here is in three dimensions what the resulting model is like.
Now let's see what the graduate students have to say
about their interpretation of this funny-looking message.
The first thing that came out of our analysis of that object
was that in profile it was strongly reminiscent of Mickey Mouse
And in fact it's still not clear whether that's the case.
And although we know that you have a sense of humour
Mickey Mouse was not our idea of a joke,
So it had to be something else.
The only thing it really looked like was a molecular orbital type
drawing of a molecule.
And the first one that came to my mind was formaldehyde
And Kathy is in fact right, this was intended to be a formaldehyde molecule
although it does look a little bit like Mickey Mouse.
In which there is a carbon atom, two hydrogens and an oxygen.
Now what could the significance of that be?
Why go to all this trouble to simply say formaldehyde?
And the answer is that
formaldehyde has a radio frequency attached to it.
And what all of this trouble is about
is the message is saying don't listen on this station,
this isn't the station that's interesting, listen on the formaldehyde station
and that's where the Encyclopedia Galactica will be.
So as soon as we get that message, quick, we turn the frequency
of our radio telescope to the formaldehyde frequency,
continue to look at the same star we're looking at
and then hopefully get such a message.
That's the general kind of idea, notice that if we made
a serious such search and succeeded, the results would be inestimable.
We would have have ended the isolation of mankind
from the rest of the universe forever.
If we made a serious search and failed, we would have determined something
of the uniqueness, fragility, preciousness of human beings
and it seems to me either way we win.