This story
is a bit different, so bear with me. It starts with the Hello World Project
that Bernd Hopfengärtner was working on this past summer. He spent a
considerable amount of time cutting a semacode into a wheat field just outside
of Ilmenau in Germany. (See wheat
field semacode.)
A "semacode" is a
special kind of a barcode, a two-dimensional barcode that is a
computer-generated visual tag. It has been used for ubiquitous computing
projects; semacode takes an URL (a web address) and converts it into a graphic
that can be read with a suitably-equipped picture phone. You see the semacode
pasted to a real world object, take a picture with your phone, the software
decodes the semacode image and voila you go to the URL on your
web-enabled phone. For example, you could put a semacode tag on a lamppost
outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that encoded
"http://www.whitehouse.gov."
So now Bernd has tagged the
Earth with a semacode that reads "Hello World." His semacode is 170
meters by 170 meters, and consists of an 18x18 grid of light and dark squares.
People can use tools like Google Earth to read it.
Apparently, he doesn't
realize that, since this object can be seen from space, it "tags" the
Earth for visiting aliens in the same way that streetcorners or other objects
can be tagged for people.
It just so happens that the
explicit idea of somehow creating codes or symbols that are large enough to be
read from space by aliens is an idea that is more than a century old. In his
1867 novel From the
Earth to the Moon, nineteenth century science fiction writer Jules
Verne wrote about a way to communicate with the inhabitants of the Moon:
I am bound to add that some practical geniuses have
attempted to establish actual communication with [the Moon]. Thus, a few days
ago, a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition to the
steppes of Siberia. There, on those vast plains, they were to describe enormous
geometric figures, drawn in characters of reflecting luminosity...
(Read more about Verne's way to communicate
with aliens)
Read more about Hello World and semacodes, via pasta&vinegar.
(This Science Fiction in
the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com - where science meets
fiction.)
-- Bill Christensen, Technovelgy.com
Credit: Bernd Hopfengärtner.
