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

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[–] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 79 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] sik0fewl@kbin.social 20 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] qooqie@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago

Help. That’s it, that’s all I’d say

[–] rgb3x3@beehaw.org 1 points 11 months ago

Probably just send them the encyclopedia brittanica

[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 7 points 11 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

[–] B0rax@feddit.de 2 points 11 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 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 13 points 11 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.

[–] ShadowCatEXE@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 7 points 11 months ago

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