Horizon Protocol

As you sit at your desk a colleague walks up to you and drops a photo onto your desk…..



"Have you seen the news? It's all over the TV" he says with an overexcited tone.

You look at the photo and can't fully appreciate what it's showing.

You log on to your computer and go directly to a news website, the 'Breaking News' banner in full swing.

You read the article and it begins to sink in.

Scientist left baffled by un-explained appearance of giant mountain…. The headline reads.

Over night a huge un-explained object has appeared directly next to Mount Everest, towering above it's peak. Scientist are perplexed by this sudden appearance, what is causing great concern among world leaders is the apparent revelation it's not of natural origin, rather from intelligent design....

Before long you find yourself in the middle of this whirlwind…. After all you are the lead scientist of SETI. It was only a matter of time before your services were required by the highest offices in the country.

You decide you need a closer look at this object, because of its very remote location you ask for a drone to scan and picture the surface to try and determine it's properties in more detail. After several days you finally receive an email containing the first batch of pictures from the drone. One picture is marked URGENT, you open the PDF...

a reply to: RiverRunsFree

I'm only flagging this because I liked reading it. Is it a photoshop thing? An animation thing? Google had a few clues, but didn;t completely match.

Go on.....

No seriously, don't leave us hanging!

That's a good start to a story. Are we supposed to help decode the image and letter string?

-dex

The OP sayis in a pm, "We must solve the puzzle".

Pat, I'd like to buy a vowel. A?

Here Lies the Monolith

Not enough data, does not compute.

a reply to: shaneslaughta

Well, there is some data. The dots are clearly a constellation of some sort. We can guess that the bigger the dot, the brighter the star. That's just about all I got so far tho...

Okay. I spent a little time with it, but I'm out of time for this project for now. Here's what I think may have some applicability:
This star map:


May be star map containing Sirius:


Played around with simple number substitution for the letter string:
a 1
b 2
c 3
d 4
e 5
f 6
g 7
h 8

h d f b h e b
8 4 6 2 8 5 2
4 2 4 6 3 3
2 2 2 3 0
0 0 1 3
0 1 2
1 1
0
This triangle is of the differences between each letter code.

Note that the number substitution is limited to numbers between 1 and 8, so maybe binary?

If anybody else can do something with this, more power to you.

-dex

Got some feedback from the OP via p2p. Looks like the substitution cipher approach was correct:
When I googled 8462852, I came up with KIC 8462852.

SETI scientist was also a clue, remember they looked at this as a possible Dyson sphere, but apparently didn't find anything conclusive.

KIC 8462852 is located in the constellation Cygnus:


Red arrow points to the location of this object.

Does the star map from the OP look anything like this?

-dex

a reply to: DexterRiley

Wow, good job. Yeah that looks very similar to the op's constellation. All i managed to get out of it was a headache.

a reply to: ApparentlyStupid

Yeah, this is a nice change of pace from all the doom and gloom threads I've been participating in.

-dex

You eventually figure out the cipher and realise it points to KIC 8462852, a star you are already familiar with…

"It has shown some surprising behavior that’s odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena. KIC 8462852 occasionally dims by as much as 20 percent, suggesting that there is some material in orbit around this star that blocks its light."

"For various reasons, it’s obvious that this material is not simply a planet. A favored suggestion is that it is debris from comets that have been drawn into relatively close orbit to the star."

"But another, and obviously intriguing, possibility is that this star is home to a technologically sophisticated society that has constructed a phalanx of orbiting solar panels (a so-called Dyson swarm) that block light from the star."

"To investigate this idea, we have been using the Allen Telescope Array to search for non-natural radio signals from the direction of KIC 8462852. This effort is looking for both narrow-band signals (similar to traditional SETI experiments) as well as somewhat broader transmissions that might be produced, for example, by powerful spacecraft."

www.seti.org...

You order all possible observatories to fix on this star…




Soon enough a signal is received…

I have a strong suspicion the numbers are some kind of coordinate system, possibly describing a vector.(A quantity having direction as well as magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another.)
The first 8 pairs of zero possibly represent the Point of Origin and could be read as
[00,00] [00,00]
[00,00] [00,00]

So working the idea that these numbers are a coordinate system leads to an idea called Quaternions.
(00,00,00,00) = (X,Y,Z,w)
One Quaternion is compared to another to determine rotation or movement

Another use of Quaternions is a thing called space-time code which relates to multiple antenna Tx and Rx

en.wikipedia.org... (Quaternion)
en.wikipedia.org... (Space-Time code)