SETI Decrypt Challenge

[algorism]

Has anyone looked at Can you decrypt this alien message? - Planetary Habitability Laboratory @ UPR Arecibo

You're supposed to be able to answer the following questions from the data in this 1.9MB text file of 0's and 1's: http://www2.mps.mpg.de/homes/heller/downloads/files/SETI_message.txt

1. What is the typical body height of our interstellar counterparts?
2. What is their typical lifetime?
3. What is the scale of the devices they used to submit their message?
4. Since when have they been communicating interstellar?
5. What kind of object do they live on?
6. How old is their stellar system?

There are 1902341 0's and 1's in the text file.
1902341 has prime factors 7 * 359 * 757
So it's logical to assume 7 pictures of 359 by 757, and that does get some results:



Note the little bit of something like morse code at the very top.

Not all are obvious pictures and I have no idea how to answer the questions.

Here's a program to turn the input file into 7 pbm files (very simple b/w image format).

#include <stdio.h>

#define NUM_PICTURES   7
#define WIDTH        359
#define HEIGHT       757

int main() {
    FILE *fin = fopen("SETI_message.txt", "r");

    for (int pic = 0; pic < NUM_PICTURES; pic++) {
        char filename[100];
        sprintf(filename, "pic%02d.pbm", pic);
        FILE *fout = fopen(filename, "w");

        fprintf(fout, "P1\n%d %d\n", WIDTH, HEIGHT);

        for (int h = 0; h < HEIGHT; h++) {
            fputc(fgetc(fin), fout);
            for (int w = 1; w < WIDTH; w++) {
                fputc(' ', fout);
                fputc(fgetc(fin), fout);
            }
            fputc('\n', fout);
        }

        fclose(fout);
    }

    fclose(fin);
    return 0;
}

[Matticus]

Interesting. Perhaps they took a cue from Contact, and the code to decipher the message is encoded within the message itself.