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Kit Bashir

“The signal is repeating! We’ve got the whole thing.”

“How many bits?”

“Almost 500k. 454,957 bits”

“I got a hunch, factorize that number”

“Bingo, seven fifty seven times six oh one. Think it could be a rectangular bitmap?”.

“It’s what we used to do back before those assholes let Arecibo fall down. Try bm2png.pl in my bin dir.”

“That worked. Holy shit I know that image. It’s the Pioneer plaque. That diagram from Pioneer 11 of human figures, and a map to Earth.”

“What, thats impossible, it’s only been, what, 70 odd years. That probe would still be in our own Kuiper Belt.”

“Outside it, actually, it’d be about one sixty AU out. They lost contact in the mid 90s. Still basically in our backyard but.”

“It’s too soon! If someone’s found it now, that would mean. Shit. They’re. Already. Here. Inside the Solar system.”

“And all they’ve got to say, is ‘Hi, we liked ur meme’.?”

“Maybe not, can you bring up an image of the original plaque? Are the images identical?”

“I’ll do a layer subtraction. Hey, there /is/ a difference. In the map of the planets. They’ve omitted Pluto from their copy.”

“Fucking hell. Little green reply guys.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction

51 comments
Kit Bashir

..."I think you mean 'we've been Little Green Mansplained'"

"Don't you start!"

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #BonusPanel

Biggles

@Unixbigot "wait!
Wait. Just... Check.
Check to see if Pluto is still there."

20 minutes later

"What the hell? It vanished from the recordings about the same time we received the first message."

"so... This maybe isn't little green reply guys, maybe it's a toxic xenophobia brigade?"

Albert ARIBAUD ✎

@Taco_lad

Nope. Looks like there's an addendum, though. Let me see... "Thanks for the bug report. Fixed it. Will initiate more general housekeeping in five <untranslatable>."

@Unixbigot

Jeff Grigg

@aaribaud @Taco_lad @Unixbigot

Then Neptune disappeared.

Followed a few weeks later by Uranus.

The people of Earth did not really start to panic until Saturn disappeared from view.

...

eric

@Unixbigot

"Quick, reply with this ASCII string and see what they have to say back: "l li ll L"

DELETED

@Unixbigot I would read the shit out of a book or series like this

Kit Bashir

@airjunglist thanks. Have you read Carl Sagan’s “Contact”? The signal encoding and its eventual meaning are much cooler than in the movie.

DELETED

@Unixbigot no but thank you I will read it, sounds interesting!

Tim Panton

@Unixbigot I had to think of @sundogplanets and the search for planet nine in the Kuiper Belt

Simon π man ⚛️🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦

@Unixbigot reminds me of this event. youtu.be/5V2KuClix_k?si=9-zL5q

I used to live near to that radio dish and even did a summer internship there.

Kit Bashir

@enmodo that must have been quite an experience!

Laux Myth (aka Martin)

@Unixbigot at some resolution, Pluto was also a pale grey dot.

llewelly

@Unixbigot
maybe they're just saying: "we heard you no longer consider pluto one of your planets, and hey, we agree!, it's not yours anymore!"

The cat who walks thru walls

@llewelly @Unixbigot "All these worlds are yours except Pluto. Attempt no landing there."

Dianora (Diane Bruce)

@Unixbigot "Oh shit there are bits of rock where Pluto used to be...."

Dismal Manor Gang

@Dianora @Unixbigot
Trusty iludium Q-38 explosive space modulator never misses. Ok, 8 to go and we can put the hyperspace bypass in.

Tom Cole

@Unixbigot okay, that was just lovely. Full marks!

Condorito

@Unixbigot

For real, if aliens wanted to get humans used to the idea of them being real and not cause us to collectively eat our own brains there are a lot worse ways than astronomy shitposting.

Wade McGillis

@Unixbigot @mcc

François, who had gotten that information from his friends at CNRS, begin, "First of all, the burst of base eight numbers are coming in groups of 16,769,021, with a longer break between each group. And what makes that interesting is that some bright people ran it through a simple factoring program and discovered thatit's equal to 4093 times 4097 - two prime numbers."

"Uh, excuse my being dumb, but this means ... ?" Lori asked.

Wade McGillis

@Unixbigot @mcc

"Since a prime number isn't divisible by any other number, if you're transmitting a grid-type pattern--say a picture or a chart--and its size is the product of two primes, then there are only a couple of possible arrangements for the numbers in the grid. If either number were not prime, there'd be a very large number of possible arrangements, and that would mean you wouldn't be able to figure out what the picture was a picture of."

Wade McGillis

@Unixbigot @mcc

skip a few paragraphs

"Has anyone tried to assemble the pictures yet?" Lori asked.
"I thought you'd never ask," Jiro said. "I have a feeling that everywhere on Earth people are showing this to each other, but they don't have quite the nerve to display it publicly."

excerpt of page 95 from "Encounter with Tiber", by Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes

NAAN

@Unixbigot "before those assholes let Arecibo fall down" that did it for me! :abunhdcry:

Tqft

@Unixbigot so good, it has been reposted into my feed 3 or 4 times and have reread each time

Shark Attak

@Unixbigot
"..this means War, little green m#therfuckers"
Like a signal, several persons in the room started taking off their sweaters and unbuttoning their shirts, revealing slogans such as "My solar system still got 9 of 'em" and "Pluto ain't gone yet" on t-shirts and other undergarments.
More than the others would've thought, more than they would've liked.

isol

@Unixbigot

I saw a YT recently, where they believe they've identified why Arecibo fell down.
Seems the radio waves caused electric currents in the spelter sockets, leading to long-term zinc-induced creep failure.

"A possible explanation for the accelerated zinc-creep is long-term low-current electroplasticity, induced by the electromagnetic waves from the Arecibo Telescope."

Next time, they'll know to build a radio telescope that doesn't fall apart because of radio waves 🤦‍♂️

@Unixbigot

I saw a YT recently, where they believe they've identified why Arecibo fell down.
Seems the radio waves caused electric currents in the spelter sockets, leading to long-term zinc-induced creep failure.

"A possible explanation for the accelerated zinc-creep is long-term low-current electroplasticity, induced by the electromagnetic waves from the Arecibo Telescope."

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