The Contact Project

One of my favorite SF movies is Contact.
Its premise is that initial contact from an alien civilization consists of a simple message: primary numbers, i.e. numbers divisible by themselves and one only. Supposedly, a string impossible to produce without intelligence.
Well, today’s FamilyFirst site takes that concept a bit further: They have a “message” received from an alien civilization, and ask your help in decoding it.
What’s this all about? I’ll let them explain:

Why are we doing this? What is this all about? Well, obviously, no messages have really been received from Tau Ceti. However, I urge you to leave reality behind for a little while, and help us try to understand the message. This should be a lot of fun for all involved, and I hope it will show us just how far we have to go before we will be able to understand any real messages we receive. There have been projects like this before. However, they have always been (in my opinion) fairly simple tests, being very anthropomorphic in nature. What I hope I have acheived here is something different. Through a lot of time and effort a message has been developed that is fairly simple in content, but very unusual in the way it is put together. It should be very difficult to understand the way in which the message is written… even if you understand its contents. In fact, there are ways it could be made even more… alien…. but then I don’t think anyone would get it. As it is, I predict it will take a few weeks anyway.
What is the real reason I selected this site? Because it’s a very interesting little peek at what the WWW was in its infancy of 1995.
This site caused quite the uproar in its day. Now, it still stands as a quaint reminder of how the web was once populated by serious geeks, instead of grandmothers selling items on eBay.
Enjoy the site, browse the old comments, use the posted C programs to translate the messages.
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/alien.html