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If you were tasked with putting together a message to send to space aliens, with the only restriction that the message had to be under 4GB, what would you send?

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JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
7 points

the other day I learned you can download Wikipedia and it’s something like 50 GB of text plus 50 GB of pictures

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MJBrune@beehaw.org
9 points

Nah, it’s 22 GB for just the current English version, text-only Wikipedia. Adding the media English current version only would be 140 GB (plus the 22 GB for the text). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

So you could do text-only Wikipedia and probably compress it. Maybe drop a few thousand of the articles that don’t matter or are stubs. Drop all the entertainment articles, etc.

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rgb3x3@beehaw.org
2 points

Drop all the entertainment articles, etc.

Or send only the entertainment articles. Why wouldn’t the aliens want to hear about the life and exploits of Leonardo DiCaprio?

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B0rax@feddit.de
2 points

A few years ago (~2010) I had the entire German Wikipedia on my 8gb iPod touch. It was only about 4gb in size without media.

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