Does Digital TV make it easier for other intelligent lifeforms?

[Kedas]

Now that we also sending more digital TV around.

I was wondering would it be easier, or more difficult for an other intelligent lifeform to reconstruct an image from it.

[insane_alien]

if its a sufficiently advanced technological civilization then it should have no trouble with either. the digital signals make it more obvious that we are sentient though.

[5614]

Although it could be viewed in reverse. A digital signal which contains only one of two possible values could be seen as simpler than an analogue wave containing a continuously varying value. Depends how you look at it really.

[Kedas]

yeah but it's not like there is a tag in their own language attached saying this is video, from their point of view it's just a stream of ones and zeros.

[bascule]

Shouldn't this be under Computer Science? Why is it in cosmology?

 

Deciphering a perceptually coded visual image is arguably a few orders of magnitude more different than deciphering a language. A very specifically designed algorithm must work upon the data set. Attempting to decode the image without the knowledge of the algorithm is an amazingly difficult task. It's for this reason, perhaps, that RealVideo has not been successfully reverse engineered, and in that case we even have a machine language version of the codec to crib off of.

 

I'm not putting it past the abilities of a super advanced alien civilization, but I think we'd be much better off transmitting unencoded audio.

[bascule]

Also, some sort of Forward Error Correction (usually Vandermonde matrices) are typically used with digital video signals so that part of the signal can be lost or distorted without losing enough information to reassemble the picture.

 

If you transmitted a raw signal, perhaps coding for only luminance (i.e. black & white) with a fixed size integer, it would be much easier to decipher the signal, but without forward error correction, it may come out quite distorted.

[Kedas]

Shouldn't this be under Computer Science? Why is it in cosmology?

 

I didn't know where to put it, so I had to choose...

The ability of an other intelligent being to undestand something alien isn't really computer science.

 

If I would give you a stream of ones and zeros in a file with the info it's a known file format you would still have a hard time figuring out what's in there.

 

For an other intelligent being it's even worse.

It's like giving this file to someone without (much) knowledge about computers. (could be your mother )

That person is an intelligent being but I'm putting my money on the fact that he/she will never figure it out without help.

 

So if we turn things around how much chance would you give us to figure out the meaning of an signal that we receive? Shouldn't that be more or less same chance? (extremely low)