20130611

Astronomy in-class activity: SETI and BETI

Astronomy 210 In-class activity 24 v.13.06.11, fall semester 2013
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA

Students find their assigned groups of three to four students, and work cooperatively on an in-class activity worksheet to discuss how messages are anticoded, and experience practical issues with incommensurability barrier by attempting to analyze content in a fictitious message from an extraterrestrial advanced technological civilization.

Start out with going over the original Arecibo message (and presumptive crop circle reply in Chilbolton, England, 2001) in a whole-class discussion. Point out to or ask students about the key features of these messages: counting (binary); height and population of inhabitants; schematic representation of planetary systems and communication devices (radio dishes and supposed crop-crushing apparatus).


With these clues, students then start working in their groups.



This is a truncated version of a much longer in-class activity which also involves counting systems and arithmetic operations used in anticoded messages.

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