It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
The use of the prime number series as a way to signal to ET is by now a fairly well-known idea. In the 1997 l m contact, an adaptation of the novel [1] by Carl Sagan, radio telescope researchers discovered a signal containing a series of prime numbers.
This led them to conclude it was a probable communication from ET.
Toward the end of the book upon which the movie was based, the main character Ellie searches for patterns in π and finds a very long string of 1s and 0s far out in the base-11 expansion of π that when arranged in a square of a specific size yields a clear drawing of a circle and its diameter.
One could say that because of the role that π plays for the circle that she has been given a scheme by which the number is rendered self-referent. This could be regarded as a second indication of an ET message. Long before this, the idea of somehow depicting the Pythagorean Theorem as a message that could be seen from space was fielded at least as far back as 1900.
Consistent with the idea of a "message", the mound geometry is profoundly pedagogical with respect to the connection between the concepts of number and size, both in terms of length and area. One’s first experience with numbers is basic counting, not magnitude of length and area.
It is almost as if the (hypothetical) builders of the pentad were taking special pains to display the basic connection between concepts of number and magnitude of length and area.
Consider the following images of the pentad of mounds taken from our recent JSE paper [5]. The mounds (GEDBA) are highlighted for clarity.
The right triangles DBA, BAE, GEA, and DAG are all similar (having the same angles). This is shown explicitly in the diagrams below. Having exactly the same side and angle measurements, clearly, the triangles GEA and BAE are congruent right triangles Figure 5.
The A4 paper size used in some parts of the world is actually a selfreplication equationgrid. As the name implies, a square root of two rectangles has a ratio of the long side to the short side equal to equation .
Thus, in the above figure if DB has the length of 1 then BA would have the length of equation . The length of GE is also equal to equation . In addition to the above Viking representation of the pentad from image 35A72 in 1997, depicted below are the corresponding images from the Mars Express.
They show not only the rectangular grid in which the pentad is embedded but an extended square root of two rectangular grid. The proportions of the triangles involved are connected directly to the value of the angle t which defines the angles that appear in the similar right triangles π/ 4- t/ 2, π/ 2,) and the isosceles triangle π/ 4+ t/ 2, π/ 4 + t/ 2. As mentioned in the introduction, the isosceles triangle has internal angles which match precisely those of the cross-section of a tetrahedron.
The skeptic could always argue that the pentad mound placement and the implied rectangular grid is a just a fluke.
However, the addition of two extra mounds (P and M) which each reinforce the possible intentionality of the mound placements as a display of prime numbers and of the geometry of the equation rectangle and by extension the tetrahedron make the fluke argument much harder to justify. There are in fact 6 other mounds nearby which also display the special tetrahedral triangles.