Can you decode this ALIEN MESSAGE?

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Chapters
0:00 - 0:53 Receiving the alien message
0:53 - 3:15 Interpreting the radio signal
3:15 - 5:00 Mysterious white squares
5:00 - 5:43 Mysterious purple blob
5:43 - 7:27 Mysterious green clusters
7:27 - 7:36 Mysterious blue twirlies
7:36 - 8:05 Mysterious red figure
8:05 - 9:34 More mysterious white squares
9:34 - 10:28 Mysterious yellow dots
10:28 - 11:12 Mysterious purple thing
11:12 - 13:08 Even MORE mysterious white squares
13:08 - Fun fact about the Arecibo message
13:48 Thank you Skillshare!

Creator - Jade Tan-Holmes
Script - Joshua Daniel
Editing - Christian Pearson and Jade Tan-Holmes

[upandatom]

Recommended course: The Science of Effective Learning by Santiago Acosta

[jkfecke]

The most important part of this signal is that it exists. If we received a similar message, we may or may not be able to decipher it -- aliens may think very differently than us. But the simple fact that it was clearly artificial and resolved into some sort of message would change the world.

[spaceshipearth]

Alien #1: What is that?
Alien #2: Ah, it's nothing. Just Tetris...

[fabriceaxisa]

nice, it is proving that this message is more a time capsule of 1974 rather than a useful message for any aliens. It will be for them just like finding only 1 tablet in mesopotamian desert from unknown civilization, at the best a stone in a museum, more certainly nothing. Nice video.

[thismianeptunis]

At 7:19, thankfully they did not actually get this wrong! Deoxyribose changes structure somewhat in order to link with the phosphate groups to form DNA. So even though isolated deoxyribose has the formula C5H10O4, the deoxyribose units *as they appear in DNA* are indeed C5H7O, just as the message says. Probably doesn't do much to make it any more comprehensible to aliens, but it does at least restore my faith in the fact-checking ability of the folks at Arecibo :)

[z-beeblebrox]

I also recall a fascinating - if somewhat frustrating - video from I think Veritasium (or maybe mindfield) where they put random people together in a room and presented a supposed alien message in the exact same format as the Aricebo Message, except it was just random noise, to see if they’d invent patterns where there aren’t any. And after some time they successfully concluded that it was noise. Which is really cool - it proves that human-like intelligence could detect an artificial message even if they can’t decipher it (since we can conclude from the experiment that they could identify a non artificial message even when primed to expect the opposite) but also frustrating because it would have been way more fun to see them try to decode an actual Arecibo like message

[MedlifeCrisis]

Such a clever idea for a video! I love how it communicates maths, physics, chemistry and biology all together like one big happy family. At least we present a united front to the aliens 😂

[jimjjewett]

I appreciate that she stored a physics text in her refrigerator. That was at least as obvious as some of the leaps required to decode the message.

[FindingAshley]

I love how you ask us questions if we deciphered the particular segment, then jumping over to the periodic table or dna molecule diagram, exclaiming "yes! " .
5:17 - 5:23
7:10 - 7:20
This is giving me such strong dora vibes!!
You could've made this entire video in dora the explorer format and could've been "Jade, the alien message decoder!"

[joshuahillerup]

I loved the bit where you're suprised how similar the aliens are to us 😂

[erictaylor]

I heard a story a radio astronomer working out of Arecibo picked up a radio signal from another planet.
He realized it was only a tiny bit bigger than the Arecibo message so when he arranged the date to the same dimensions, sure enough, the signal was the Arecibo massage with a small addition, just 7 words, in English,
:Be quiet or they will hear you.
Fun fact, if whoever receives the Arecibo message has the same criteria we require to say for sure it is an alien message, it would fail to meet that requirement.

[laurenlewis]

The solution to the Fermi Paradox: We're not alone, but the aliens don't want to make contact because our scientists sound desperate

[michaellarusch]

Thanks for taking the time to explain the message! Fun Fact: The Arecibo message was used by one of the puzzles in the Master Theorem puzzle book.

[MamaDespik]

Would the doppler effect change the wavelength of the message by the time it got there? If so, whoever (successfully) decodes it is going to think humans are HUGE.

[ichigo_nyanko]

It is clear to me you knew how the message works before you 'deciphered' it (not that there's anything wrong with that, it's still a good educational video). I would love to see an experiment done where this message (and perhaps some alternatives) is given a mix of people: Mathematicians, Physicists, Biologists, and a regular person. (Maybe other specialities too, but I'm thinking about who would be the ones trying to decpiher an alien message if we ever got one) - Split them into many groups - each group containing a mix of specialitie - sand give them some time, maybe an hour, maybe a week, and see if any of the groups manage to decypher it.

p.s. personally, I think the idea of using the wavelength of the message as a ruler is very natural and clever. I can't think of anything that would work better, other than the plank length - but that would require numbers so large that it would make the message harder to understand in my opinion. I think they made the right choice. It was such a natural choice in my opinion, that out of all the parts of the message, it was the one I figured out the quickest and easiest. My thought process was "They can't have possibly used any units because they would have to describe the units in the message, and to describe the units they would have to use units. It can't be the plank length because that would be too small. It must be encoded in the size of the message somehow. The only way I could see it doing that is by being a multiple of the wavelength".

The hardest part was the molecular part. I don't think it is obvious at all that you have to "line up" the numbers with the life producing elements to get the molecules. I would have thought, if I could figure out they meant elements at all, that they were directly describing molecules. (e.g. 7 3 1 2 3 would not mean "7 Hydrogen, 3 Oxygen, etc" but would rather mean "one element with atomic number 7, two elements with atomic number 3, one element with atomic number 1, etc). I would think 'perhaps it is a polymer, and the order of the numbers shows it's repeating structure'

[PhreakDarkSoul]

I like the fact sending a super simplified pixel image of a really complex real thing (like our solar system) and how aliens are rushing to the wall, pointing on an image of our solar system and screaming: This is it! The are there, start your engines!

[brendanh]

Alien 1: So we are looking at a blue elephant, with big blue ears, a white stripe down its back, and a red trunk with four fingers.

Alien 2: Are you sure that the red part isn't a comb?

Alien 3: No it's... I believe that we should cover the young one's eyes now...

[flipvansaksen]

Excellent video . I hope the aliens smoke pipes like Sherlock otherwise i’m afraid they will miss the clues. Can we not simply beam this video into space ? They will be grateful 😊 you saved them quite some time.

[hanfo]

Now imagine you are an ant on a planet that tries not to starve. Not sure if it will answer. 😂

[Professor_Brie]

Yeah there are definitely a lot of flaws in this message. The one that stood out to me was the information about DNA. If this message were to reach an alien civilization, what if those aliens evolved with a genetic material that wasn’t a DNA double helix?? It seems to me the information about DNA would be rather unhelpful and uninterpretable if the aliens have no way of recognizing it.