[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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