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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 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

Help. That’s it, that’s all I’d say

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Probably just send them the encyclopedia brittanica

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

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