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?
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.
So you could do text-only Wikipedia and probably compress it. Maybe drop a few thousand of the articles that don’t matter or are stubs. Drop all the entertainment articles, etc.
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.
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
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