All you have to do is look it up in Neil J.A. Sloane's "The Encyclopedia of
Integer Sequences," Academic Press, 1995. Or better yet, look it up online
at http://akpublic.research.att.com:80/~njas/sequences/ . Bob.
Spike Jones wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > Then ask them how many Mersenne primes they know. Then send them a
> couple, and
> > they can send us a couple, so forth. It could be a race. Can we find
> the 137th
> > Mersenne prime before the Aeraibvcas do? Our superiority as a race is
> at stake!
>
> Let me turn this around. When or if we ever receive signals from
> exocivilizations, those signals might well be in the form of a list of
> primes, as in Sagan's excellent book and now movie Contact.
> It would not surprise me at all if instead of a list of primes, they
> send us the series 2,3,5,7,13,19,31,61,89,107,127,521...
>
> If they did, most scientists would be baffled, but you and I would get
> it. We
> would grok that message bigtime. We would be among the approximately
> 50,000 humans of 6E9 that would grok that message immediately without
> having to look it up. spike
>
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