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In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, Ellie Arroway, the book's heroine, has been working at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, listening to the crackle of the cosmos. One night, as the radio telescopes arc turned toward Vega, they suddenly pick up strange pulses through the background noise. Two pulses are followed by a pause, then three pulses, five, seven.
continuing through 97 Then it starts all over again. Ellie is convinced that only intelligent life could generate the structure in the sequence of pulses. "It's hard to imagine some radiating plasma sending out a regular set of mathematical signals like this." What is it about the structure of the pulses that the book's heroine recognizes as the sign of intelligent life? Asked in another way, what is significant about the numbers of pulses?
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