Imagine that we sent a robot-controlled spaceship out to the far reaches of the galaxy to contact other life forms. On the ship, we placed a copy of all the text on the internet over the last three years so intelligent alien races would be able to learn something about us. After traveling twelve light-years, the ship enters the solar system around the star Luyten where it is boarded by aliens. The Luytenites retrieve the copy of the internet text and try to make sense of it.
They ask their top linguists to interpret these strange symbols but make little progress. The Luytenites were in the same position as eighteenth-century archaeologists who kept discovering stones with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Finally, in 1799, archaeologists discovered the Rosetta stone which had both Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient Greek text. Because they had what turned out to be the same decree in two languages, they were finally able to figure out the meanings of the hieroglyphs.
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