-=> On 02-05-98  13:04, Paul Andinach said to Ivy Iverson,<=-
-=>"About Speculations & fact...,"<=-
-=> Quoting Ivy Iverson to Jack Sargeant <=-
 
Hi, Paul;
 
 JS> ... A chess game would take longer
 JS> to play than our solar system will last.
 
 II> True, if it were in another part of the galaxy, however if it were one
 II> of our close neighbors, like Alpha Proxima at 4+ light years, it would
 II> "only" take a little over 8 years to get an answer, (or the next move
 II> in the chess game).
 PA> . . .
 JS> Just a simple, "Hello, out there!" might take a thousand years to get
 JS> any kind of reply. ...And that is about all we dare to hope for.
 
 II> ...Or less than 5 years if it's one of our "neighbors."
 
 PA> You're leaving out the time that it would take for our neighbours
 PA> to realise the signal is intelligent, work out that it's coded sound
 PA> waves (or binary, or whatever), reconstruct the language in which the
 PA> message is written, and translate it into their language....
 PA> ... As if that wasn't long enough, they'd probably decide that
 PA> communication with aliens was a matter of planetary concern, and form a
 PA> global Answer Summit to come up with a reply acceptable to all the
 PA> delegates. 
 PA> If that happened, a thousand years until we received the reply
 PA> would be about right. ;)
 
Heh heh, I see your point... I guess I was assuming that communication
had already been established and the language barrier broken... And there
is a Rosetta stone that could be used to get a toehold on the labguage
barrier: The periodic table of the elements, which is universal.
 
Catch you later... Keep l00king up!
   Ivy
 
 
 
... The SysOp of this BBS is from Alpha Centuri, The CoSysOp is from Mars.
 
                 --
 -=[ Ivy's WALL BBS  Hi, Jack!  Happy New Year to All! ]=-
 
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