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? (lemm.ee)

submitted 7 months ago by JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 79 points 7 months ago

4GB is an absolute fuck ton of text. Like, solid chunk of Wikipedia would fit in there.

[-] sik0fewl@kbin.social 20 points 7 months ago

If you were restricted to just 700MM words, what would you say?

[-] qooqie@lemmy.world 14 points 7 months ago

Help. That’s it, that’s all I’d say

[-] rgb3x3@beehaw.org 1 points 7 months ago

Probably just send them the encyclopedia brittanica

[-] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 7 points 7 months ago

the other day I learned you can download Wikipedia and it's something like 50 GB of text plus 50 GB of pictures

[-] MJBrune@beehaw.org 9 points 7 months ago

Nah, it's 22 GB for just the current English version, text-only Wikipedia. Adding the media English current version only would be 140 GB (plus the 22 GB for the text). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

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.

[-] rgb3x3@beehaw.org 2 points 7 months ago

Drop all the entertainment articles, etc.

Or send only the entertainment articles. Why wouldn't the aliens want to hear about the life and exploits of Leonardo DiCaprio?

[-] B0rax@feddit.de 2 points 7 months ago

A few years ago (~2010) I had the entire German Wikipedia on my 8gb iPod touch. It was only about 4gb in size without media.

[-] BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 3 points 7 months ago

So you send them text that they can't read?

[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 13 points 7 months ago

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.

[-] ShadowCatEXE@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago

You can also get 2-3 movies worth with 4gb depending on its length and quality. Maybe even more.

[-] Pantherina@feddit.de 7 points 7 months ago

So they need to understand our colors, video codecs, displays, sound, and so much more?

[-] murmelade@lemmy.ml 7 points 7 months ago

Surely Wikipedia exists in Klingon already?

this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023

53 points (90.8% liked)

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