Talk:Arecibo answer

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Rational Qualification

(Text added 11:57, 18 February 2013‎ by Blyancey (talk) While the likelihood of the message ever being received is low, that does not make it impossible. There are large amounts of evidence from reputable sources that indicate that extra terrestrial life has visited earth before, dating back to the times of the ancient Egyptian civilizations. The stereotypical human idea of what an extra terrestrial being looks like could therefore have some factual grounding considering this information. Another point of consideration is the location of where the answer was left: right next to a government research facility. Further research into this location would yield findings that this is not the first time a message has been inscribed there. If this "answer" were, in fact, a hoax, the only people that could have successfully performed the hoax without being shot at by government security is the government themselves. Also, as for why the message wasn't simply transmitted as a radio response, the message was intended to be received by the entire world, not just a few agencies that can control and conceal this information from the public eye. The best way to ensure that everyone sees something is to present a large enough advertisement, and that is what this message can be considered to be. Immediate dismissal of the unlikely or irrational as completely false or impossible usually tends to indicate that something has been overlooked or disregarded, hopefully this offers a new perspective that encompasses things overlooked so that the truth may be realized.

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Cut from article, and pasted here by Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 17:24, 18 February 2013 (UTC))

Bugrit, where should I start...

Contrary to your assertion, there's no "evidence from reputable sources" for paleocontact.

The "government facility" is a radio observatory - a big dish antenna with a few buildings nearby. It's not a nuclear missile base or some other kind of "shoot first, ask questions later" object. Note that the formation was created in a crop field - a private field that ends right next to the observatory. The security of the observatory most likely consists of a couple of guys checking passes at day and watching CCTV screens at night, and the security cameras, if any, likely cover only the inner grounds and the important doors/expensive equipment. The "circle" was some distance away and the view seems to be obstructed by hedges and trees. But even if the security noticed something, their reaction would be on the lines of "let's call the cops, someone is vandalizing the crop". (It's not in the property they are paid to be securing.)

Any extraterrestrial spacecraft powerful enough to get its alien crew to Earth to stomp on some crops would be powerful enough to blast their message at high enough power to be seen with an ordinary TV set. Interstellar travel requires insane amounts of energy, so an alien spacecraft in orbit would mean not a cryptic scribble in a field on some obscure island, but that egghead alien appearing on TV screens over half the world.--ZooGuard (talk) 18:10, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

I presume that you were thinking of this. Генгис^{RationalWiki GOLD member} 20:54, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Re. the claim that in a field next to Chilbolton radio-telescope "the only people that could have successfully performed the hoax without being shot at by government security is the government themselves", that is absurd. Here in England security staff at facilities like Chilbolton do not carry guns, or even have access to them. The night security staff will be there mainly to prevent the theft of expensive equipment, along with deterring the odd vandal or any gypsy who fancies parking a caravan on the fringes of the site. They would be unlikely to even notice discrete activities in neighboring cornfields, and if they did would probably just call the farmer and warn him he seemed to have trespassers on his land.--Gurneyjonathan (talk) 15:12, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Lightspeed

Thread title added by me.--ZooGuard (talk) 20:18, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Just thought I'd mention that, contrary to the articles statement of the craft racing it's destination in 25,000 years, it will not. If the destination is 25,000 light years away, the craft would have to travel at the speed of light to do so, a feat we know it is not capable of.^{— Unsigned, by: 66.249.83.191 / talk 02:20, 3 January 2015 (UTC)}

Ignoring Evidence does not negate that evidence

ALL crop circles are hoaxes!?

So the article claims that crop circles are KNOWN hoaxes... but then at the same time there have been challenges made to replicate the crop circles that we have found, replicate them at night, without the use of light, and only during the night, and NO ONE has been able to re-perform the more spectacular circles. Anyone claiming that the magnetic anomalies, the appearance that crop has been exposed to large amounts of microwave frequency radiation... all these things are not easy to replicate, never mind that anyone claiming to perform hoaxes are usually only owning up to the more simple patterns.

Claiming they are all known hoaxes is pure intellectual dis-honesty, or the person saying such a thing is ignorant or lying to themselves.

I'm no expert, I've probably not got all my facts precisely straight, so dismiss what I say for those reasons and I'd consider that "dishonesty or lying to yourself", this article reads like a government dis-information, sort it out! These topics are not so cut and dry!^{— Unsigned, by: 80.254.158.4 / talk / contribs} 15:17, 23 August 2013‎ (UTC)

New sections go to the bottom, not to the top. As for the rest... if you have any positive evidence for crop circles being created by an extraterrestrial intelligence, I'd like to see it. Meanwhile, I have some suggested reading for you: ISBN 0954805429.--ZooGuard (talk) 16:59, 23 August 2013 (UTC)

RationalWiki, more like psuedoskeptic wiki amirite http://www.ecn.org/cunfi/Haselhoff.pdf 50.149.54.37 (talk) 08:43, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

How exactly is this relevant to this particular crop "circle"?--ZooGuard (talk) 18:03, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Conspiracy wisdom: there are numerous documented cases of a phenomenon happening one way, and zero with substantive evidence of happening another. But the fact that all haven't been proven conclusively to be caused by people faking it means that some aren't.

Just like some lightning is caused by Thor. Ikanreed (talk) 19:16, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Your mind is not open enough.

Can you demonstrate that some crop circles are not caused by aliens?

Can you demonstrate that some lightening is not caused by Thor?

Can you demonstrate that some presents are not delivered by Santa?

It's easy to demonstrate that some crop circles are not real; that lightening can be caused by thunderstorms and that some parents are responsible for the presents - but how can you know that this this is true for all cases?--Weirdstuff (talk) 20:45, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

But wait, wait! Is it really possible to demonstrate these things? What if aliens are secretly mind controlling humans to create crop circles?! What if Thor is secretly creating these lightnings in thunderstorms from a distance?! What if Santa Claus has indoctrinated humanity into buying presents for their kids so he doesn't have to!??!? Oh my Gosh guys, how can we be sure of anything?! :O 141.134.75.236 (talk) 21:03, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

The not being able to decode transmission problem

I'm not sure how you get that an alien race wouldnt be able to decode a message spacifically designed to be self decoding by way of universal language(mathmatics), you also make no atempt to prove your points and instead you assume your version of common knowledge is common when it is not at all, Wy not attempt to prove no star system like the one shown in the response isnt there? 27years * speed of transmition = its rough location in the galaxy and it shouldnt be hard to find out what systems exisist there, before you say I should do this my self I would point out that the burden of proof is on you to proove it is a hoax not on the rest of us to prove it is not as you ignore elctromagnetic problems in crop circles not known to be hoaxes for sure, the immpossiblity of a human bening the crop down perfectly without breaking but rather exploding the stem and the large number of ball lightening reports in crop circles! ^{— Unsigned, by: 174.51.185.128 / talk / contribs 18:35, 26 February 2015 (UTC)}

I think you're quite possibly someone who has seen neither crops nor humans before. Corn, for example, is trivially easy to knock over without breaking, corn stalks are almost hollow. Ikanreed (talk) 18:38, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Actually, most crop circles are in cereal crops, not corn.--ZooGuard (talk) 19:34, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

1. I suggest looking at the Wikipedia article about the wp:Arecibo message and see how much assumptions and mental gymnastics are necessary for decoding it. An extraterrestrial intelligence may be able to recognize it as a product of another intelligence, but extracting useful information from it is an entirely different matter. It's by no means "self-decoding".
2. The Milky Way, our galaxy, is about a hundred thousand light-years across. Less than thirty light years is not a great distance by astronomical standards, and there are not many stars that close to the Sun. The Arecibo message was aimed at wp:Messier 13, a star cluster twenty thousand light-years away, which is three orders of magnitude more than you need.
3. Anyway, M13's celestial coordinates are: RA 16h 41m 41.24s, Dec +36° 27′ 35.5″. You can start with Wikipedia's wp:List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, it includes coordinates. Good luck in your search!
4. As I've pointed out in a discussion above, a return message in the form of a crop circle makes no sense. The original message was by radio, and if it was received, the answer would also be by radio. If any aliens were inclined to haul ass to the Earth, they would not put their message in a wheat field in the middle of nowhere. Interstellar travel requires immense amounts of energy, and any craft capable of such travels in such a short period would be more than adequately equipped to blast a TV transmission all over the half of the Earth it was above.
5. Assuming for the sake of argument that the thing about "exploded stems" is true, you have provided no evidence that this was the case for the "Answer". Even the most die-hard believers accept that some circles are human-made. Why not this one?

And this is enough for now, it's late where I live.--ZooGuard (talk) 19:34, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Debunking the content itself

It isn't hard to find, even without any training, some flaws in the creation of the message that would clearly point out this message is a fake. Let's examine every elements in the "answer":

1. Numbers in binary: left untouched. Right, after all, a civilization advanced enough to get it would probably know binary too.

2. Composition of DNA (atoms): Silicon? Silanes aren't really stable. Also, it isn't ridiculous to assume that, if an E.T intelligence gets the message, they wouldn't understand this.

3. ...But supposing they got the message first, why didn't they change it here? We can then say they didn't understand. But then it is likely they would completely erase it in the answer, and put another information.

4. It is quite suspicious that there is no difference in the digits between human and LGM's genome size save for 1 digit.

5. What kind of freak DNA is that? A double helix, but one being itself a double helix? The fu...*llerene*?

6. Speanking of LGMs, why do they even look like LGMs? The fact it is a classical depiction of aliens doesn't make it a real specie...

7. The author didn't change human population, size and telescope's size. Why wouldn't an alien try to put extra information on the reply and trim it instead of sending it back?

8. Ooh... Looks like their god is indeed the FSM.Towerator (talk) 16:28, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

another theory

I have another theory about the crop circle and the arecibo reply. The hypothesis that we live in a simulation is now taken more seriously, see the double slit experiment, Tom cambel, Nick Bostrom, etc.. Since It will take nearly 25,000 years for the message to reach its intended destination, crop cirlcle are not coming from alien but from the creator of our simulation, they are not telling us where they live (it's pretty obvious that there is no advanced civilisation on Mars or Jupiter moons) Our world might be modeled on their world, with a solar system very similar, to produce an interesting advanced civilisation similar but not exaclty the same then theirs. They are giving us hints on what we should do and where we should go to expend our civilisation in order to have more chances to succed, it's very probable that in the "distant" future Mars and Jupiter moons will be colonised by humans (if we do not destroy ourself before). They are not coming directly in our world othervise it would spoiled the goal of the simulation, people will start to worship them, be mad, panic wait for them to solve everything or whatever. ^{— Unsigned, by: Ben951 / talk / contribs}

Aside from the fact that we will never have any reason to believe in the unfalsifiable simulation argument... Your theory, while amusing, desperately lacks parsimony. I mean, how is positing that the entire universe is a computer simulation not complete overkill in an attempt to explain something as utterly unspectacular as crop circles? Could it be that they were just made with planks by hoaxsters/artists/bored teenagers? Reverend Black Percy (talk) 01:05, 31 January 2017 (UTC)