Elite: Dangerous Players Developed A Creative Approach To Contacting Aliens

Elite Dangerous is an incredibly expansive space simulator game that because of its size, many [...]

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Elite Dangerous is an incredibly expansive space simulator game that because of its size, many players find creative ways to function within this fictional world. With the "mysterious" alien races coming forward, one player took it upon himself to answer the age old question regarding alien races: how would we react during first contact?

The alien race Thargoids are a group of beings that only recently became more visible in the game, though sightings have been reported as early as January. A few months ago, a new trailer gave some insight into this newly learned race gave us a lot more questions than it gave answers. Despite this, the overall player reaction was to take them out after an eventful confrontation made enemies out of the human race. But one player saw beyond that and came up with a way to communicate with the Thargoids.

Benjamin "Heisenberg6626" Bahr has been working with other players that make up the Canonn Interstellar Research group. He recently took to the Elite forums to discuss the creative way him and his friends are looking to make peaceful contact with the Thargoid race, despite it not technically being possible (yet) within the game:

"Given that we currently have no in-game methods of contacting the Aliens known as Thargoids, I propose we at least make sure that FDev realizes there are CMDRs who attempt to do this on an RP level.

Using the scientific methods available to us thanks to the efforts of Canonn Interstellar Research, we have been able to reverse-engineer a UA, and encode a message to the Thargoids in the sound patterns emitted by the Thargoid Sensors:

Code: MLOEOH, MLOHSH, OEOHQB, OHQBSE, OHSESH, NLTHSK, NLSKUM, THSKXH, SKXHWL, SKWLUM, OLVOSO, OLSOSR, VOSOYQ, SOYQVS, SOVSSR, ONSTPS, ONPSNU, STPSSX, PSSXOW, PSOWNU, OOLVLS, OOLSIS, LVLSJY, LSJYHV, LSHVIS, MOGSHP, MOHPFN, GSHPCS, HPCSDO, HPDOFN, LOELHL, LOHLHI, ELHLBJ, HLBJEH, HLEHHI, LMHGKH, LMKHMF, HGKHHC, KHHCLD, KHLDMF, NNLMLN, NNLMNL, NNNLOM, NNOMON, NNONNO, NNNOLN"

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(Photo: Heisenberg6626)

The above project has been in the works for over a year now, with constant research going into how exactly peaceful contact can be met. In his original post on the thread, he provided links to the sound responses from the above codes, how to draw the image itself, and more. All of these tools, for those interested, can be found here.

In a follow up e-mail, Bahr opened up a little bit about the materials he felt were useful to this project as well as why it's so important to make this contact:

"I put in quite some work. A few hours for the first post and about twelve hours for the actual coding and decoding of the message to the Thargoids. Reverse-engineering that was quite the hassle. Then about six hours for the video."

"It is never too late to start talking to each other," he added. "I think one reason why the Cold War did not become hot was because of the direct phone line between the US and the Soviets," he said. There are trigger-happy humans and trigger-happy Thargoids, he added, but as history has shown us he believes that a calmer approach from both sides could provide for peaceful communication. He, and many others, believe that this game is a "sandbox" for players to "build cool sandcastles out of." It will be interesting to see what comes from his research!

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