Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beamatronic 2189 days ago
That’s why somebody needs to send out a sequence of prime numbers
3 comments

What protocol do you use to represent the sequence? Bytes, Morse, Amplitude modulation, frequency modulation? All of these combinations may appear random to one without the right codec.
1 is 1 blip, 2 is 2 blips, etc. just like in the movie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

I wonder if this could be accomplished with a train of satellites. All in the same orbit. Just spaced out like this:

xx xxx xxxxx xxxxxxx

So they just go around and around, including the light, from the point of view of a far away perspective

You would need to set up the satellites in such a way that anyone receiving your message is viewing their orbits edge on. Your satellites would also have to be extremely large and fairly close to your host star. And there’d have to be no dust between your star and the receiver.

As a method to communicate with people you don’t know exist, it’s not very good because chances are they won’t be viewing your satellites edge on. For people you know are there, it’s needlessly complicated and expensive.

If you’re going to go to the trouble, you’d be better off making a Dyson swarm and cloaking your star completely. You’d get energy back and be just as detectable for a civilization that thought to compare visible and IR sources (which some Earth scientists have done, with negative results).

It would take 500 million years to get there, if the signal was strong enough in the first place.
Maybe is encrypted because we are not the intended receiver.