Introducing the World of Space-Truckers

Astronomers recently started receiving a mysterious signal, apparently from outside of our Solar System. Far from being random noise, the signal appears to contain structured data in the form of text, audio, and visual content – an alien transmission! The transmission starts with a basic primer on terminology and math and rapidly works its way up to describing some sort of large plastic disc imprinted with something the message called “multi-media interactive content” that is then connected to a display device and spun around (how ludicrous!) at thousands of RPMs while a laser beam reads grooves burned into the spinning disc. Laser beams. Grooves. Spinning wheels. All ridiculous, but there’s no accounting for alien sensibilities, right?

The following is a reconstruction of the content that was recovered from that transmission and burned onto what is now known as the “Dead Sea CD.” Due to the nature of its journey through space and time, parts of the transmission were not received, and the data contained was unrecoverable. At the same time, the connected nature of the data resulted in other parts being corrupted. Consequently, many of the images and still frames you are about to view represent data that has been patched back together using the best tools and resources at our disposal.

Talented teams of professional engineers, scientists, and even sociologists have worked long and hard to bring about this reconstructed image of what we believe the people who left us – or sent to us – this record look like:

Figure 1.1 – Best guess at the appearance of the originators of the Space-Truckers transmission

The next section contains the reconstructed text and image content recovered from the transmission. Because the original message was expressed symbolically and not in any human language, the latest GPT-3 text generation AI was trained on the transmission’s symbols so that it could then produce the content that follows and format it consistently with the rest of this book.