Earlier I posted the notion that Mersenne primes might be used to
impress extraterrestrial civilizations. After thinking it thru, I think we
can make a stronger arguement than that: Mersenne primes might
be the *best* yardstick to *prove* a certain level of technological
achievement, perhaps the most logical yardstick.
Consider: Interstellar messages may be in the form of binary messages
where the number of bits is the product of two large primes (call them
M and N). Any mathematically oriented receiver would place the bits
into an MxN array and color in the 0s (or 1s) and get a black and white
picture. These pictures cannot be used to *prove* ones level of technology
level for they could easily be faked. We could create a picture of a
more advanced city that we currently have, for instance, from a model.
But, the primes *cannot* be faked. You either have the computational
ability to find them or not. We could send out a list of all known
primes as a proof of computational prowess, but I would suggest
sending only the Mersennes would prove our technology to any possible
exocivilizations with far less power wasted sending all known primes.
Can anyone think of any way to *prove* the level of sophistication
of our current society, better than a list of Mersenne primes? spike
________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
