LW - That Alien Message - The Animation by Writer

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: That Alien Message - The Animation, published by Writer on September 7, 2024 on LessWrong. Our new video is an adaptation of That Alien Message, by @Eliezer Yudkowsky. This time, the text has been significantly adapted, so I include it below. The author of the adaptation is Arthur Frost. Eliezer has reviewed the adaptation. Part 1 Picture a world just like ours, except the people are a fair bit smarter: in this world, Einstein isn't one in a million, he's one in a thousand. In fact, here he is now. He's made all the same discoveries, but they're not quite as unusual: there have been lots of other discoveries. Anyway, he's out one night with a friend looking up at the stars when something odd happens. [visual: stars get brighter and dimmer, one per second. The two people on the hill look at each other, confused] The stars are flickering. And it's just not a hallucination. Everyone's seeing it. And so everyone immediately freaks out and panics! Ah, just kidding, the people of this world are smarter than ours; What they do is try to work together and figure out what's going on. It turns out that exactly one star seems to shift in brightness every 1.005 seconds. Except, the stars are light years away, so actually the shifts must have happened a long time ago, and somehow they've all been perfectly timed to reach Earth specifically every 1.005 seconds. If you look at the stars from a high-orbit satellite (which of course this planet has) then the flickering looks a little out of sync. So whatever this is, it's directed at Earth. Nobody can find a pattern in the position of the stars, but it's one at a time getting either much dimmer or much brighter by the same amount and, well, that looks a bit like binary. So loads of people think 'huh, maybe it's a code!'. But a lot of other people wonder, 'Who would be trying to send a message to Earth by shifting the brightness of stars across the galaxy? There must be an easier way to talk to us?' But it seems like there must be some intelligence behind it, so the data gets gathered and put on the internet. Some people wonder if maybe it's somehow dangerous, but, well, whoever is making the stars change brightness probably has easier ways to destroy humanity. And so the great analysis begins. Half the planet's physicists, mathematicians, cryptographers, precocious kids, crossword enthusiasts, whoever, they're all trying to work out what this means, they're trying to crack the code. And as they do, the stars keep flickering, exactly one every 1.005 seconds. There are some obvious patterns [visual: display the code, probably someone lining up different wrappings and finding one that makes the pattern look less noisy]: it seems like the numbers come in groups of 32, which in turn come from four groups of 8. Some chunks are much more common. [visual: chunks of 8 getting matched across the text, sorted into uneven piles perhaps] By the way, they do all this just in the first five hours, because like I said, people here are smart. Their civilisation is… a bit more on top of things. And so they are very ready to respond when, after five hours and 16,384 winking stars, it seems like the message begins to repeat itself, or, almost repeat itself, it's just slightly different this time. And it keeps going. [slow zoom out on code going from one line to two, showing only a few differences between the new line and the previous line] Some people start thinking maybe we're seeing the next row of a picture, pixel by pixel. Only, the designers of this image format - whoever they are - use four primary colours instead of three [visual of 32-chunk getting broken into four 8-chunks]. And the picture seems less chaotic if we assume they do binary slightly differently to us. [probably someone gesturing at a diagram of how to get numbers from binary repres...