Interstellar Communications
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By Girvan McKay, T.A.S.
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Mysteries of the Cosmos
Even those of us who understand very little of the technicalities of astronomy
can’t help being attracted to it (if we are curious at all about the Universe) because of the
possibility it offers of answering some of the great mysteries of the Cosmos. Perhaps the
most fascinating question of all is: Are we alone in the universe - or is there anyone else
out there? This, in turn, raises a further question: If there is other intelligent life besides
ourselves, is there any chance that we might some day be able to communicate with it? This
second question is of particular interest to me because I’ve spent a good part of my life
working in the field of communication between people speaking different languages, and
more recently I’ve been taking an interest in interlinguistics, which could be described as
the study of how it is or might be possible to communicate directly with people speaking a
language we cannot understand and who cannot understand ours.
Pioneer 10
We might do worse than begin by studying something that happened in 1972. In
March of that year, U.S. scientists launched the space vehicle Pioneer 10. In the ambitious
hope that on its long journey into deep space it might eventually be found by some
intelligent life form elsewhere in the Universe, it carried a number of human artefacts which,
it was thought, might convey a message to these hypothetical beings. Perhaps the main
showpiece was a metal plate engraved with a number of diagrams showing such things as
the position of the earth in our solar system and in our galactic neighbourhood, the symbol
representing the hydrogen atom (hydrogen - atomic number 1 - being the most common
element in the universe), and the naked figures of a man and a woman who, even without
any clothes on, still managed to look very American.
I trust that our friends in the United States will forgive me if I say that when it
comes to dealing with other cultures and languages, your average American - a member of
a nation which is otherwise very technically advanced - tends to be rather naive. In this
respect they are rather less advanced than the original native Americans who, before the
White Man appeared, had already developed a highly effective sign language for inter-tribal
communication, smoke signals for long-distance communication, and a pictorial language
for messages within their own group. We could very well have serious doubts about
whether the diagrams - to say nothing of the recordings and other artefacts on Pioneer 10
and subsequent vehicles, will convey any clear message to any life form not belonging to
our "tribe" or "tribes". These items consisted, not only of the engravings on the metal plate
but also of recordings of several earth languages, including the auxiliary international
language Esperanto, and other earth sounds such as the cries of whales. It is conceivable
that the recordings might in some remote future be listened to and the depictions on the
metal plate examined by curious eyes. I would suggest, however, that the latter are
unlikely to convey any kind of clear message to another life form. For one thing, they are
engraved on a flat surface; they are two-dimensional.
The snag is that not all creatures, and not even all human beings, are able to
interpret two-dimensional images. During part of my life I was living and working in a
remote mountain area of Portugal. The old lady who did the cooking and cleaning for us
at the mining camp where I worked was uneducated and totally illiterate. One day when I
was reading an illustrated magazine, she looked over my shoulder and saw a picture of an
attractive girl on one of the pages. Her reaction to the picture showed that she had no idea
what it depicted. It certainly did not convey a photograph of a pretty girl to her eyes or
brain. Having no experience of reading, it seems that she was also unable to interpret t
images on a flat surface, as opposed to the three-dimensional images of the saints that she
saw in church. We don’t need to go to an isolated region in Portugal or to confine
ourselves to observing illiterate people to find this kind of inability to interpret images. We
are probably all familiar with those tests and puzzles where one is confronted with a graphic
depiction of something or someone in which all outlines have been omitted and only a
pattern of light and shade left. Some people will look at it and immediately recognise it as
the face of a bearded man or a well-known trade logo, but others will be unable to see
anything but a series of splotches. Scientists tells us that even intelligent animals such as
dogs are unable to recognise flat images, but as we have seen, this can also be true of
intelligent humans.
Problems
So let’s think of some of the problems in extraterrestrial communication. Let’s deal
first of all with the ways in which other animals communicate, because at present the lower
animals are the only other life-forms that we know and can relate to. In our house we used
to have a little cat. She had quite a wide vocabulary of sounds conveying hunger, pleasure,
anger, surprise, and so on. If she wanted to convey any more complicated message, she
used actions. If she wanted to say (to put it politely), "I want to go out into the garden to
relieve myself", she’d go to her litter tray without doing anything, then to the back door,
and then, if we didn’t pay any attention, back to the litter tray again. She knew that we
didn’t like her using the tray during the day, so she’d threaten to use it as many times as it
took to persuade us to open the door. When she wanted to say, "This food is terrible and
I’m not going to eat it", she’d pretend that it was waste in her litter tray and make a if to bury
it.
Whales
I’ve mentioned recordings of whales. Dolphins and whales communicate by an
elaborate system of whistles and songs. Strangely enough, the original inhabitants of the
Canary Islands, a people called the Guanches, also developed a whistle language. This is
still used by the present-day Spanish-speaking islanders to send messages over long
distances, like the drum languages of Africa. The way drum communication works is that,
although a drum can’t copy the sounds of words, it can copy the rhythms and highs and
lows of what are called "tone" languages.
But to return to examples from the animal kingdom: I’m sure we’ve all read about
the way that bees describe the route to sources of nectar by doing complicated directional
dances. This has relevance for our subject, because we do not know how other possible
life-forms might communicate. They may not use sound at all; or they may use sound in
quite a different way - in other frequencies, for example. Then again, it is possible to
communicate by gesture, provided that the gestures are understood, as is the case among
the deaf. However, even on earth, there are problems with signing, because just as there
are different spoken languages in the world, there are also different sign languages. The
system of signing used by the deaf in the United States, for example, is different from that
used in, say Britain, despite the fact that when speaking verbally and lip-reading, they use
the same language.
Limbs or Mouths?
It’s true that quite a number of human gestures would be easily understood by any
earthling, such as the sign of putting your hand to your mouth to show you want food, but
even on earth not all life forms eat the way humans do. Some do not take in their
nourishment by mouth at all. (This is sometimes the case with humans when ill in hospital).
For all we know, extraterrestrials may have neither limbs nor mouths. In spite of the fact
that all life on earth is carbon-based, there is a huge variety of bodily structures with very
differing limbs, sensory organs, sound-making equipment, and so on. We could hardly
expect extraterrestrials to resemble us, or even any other earthly creature. It has been
suggested that elsewhere in the Universe life could be silicon-based, which would surely
make such life-forms totally different from ourselves.
The Long Light-Years
The difficulties of communication over distances of light-years seem almost or
totally insuperable. Even radio communication with our own moon and with our home
planets involves considerable time-lag between reception and reply. If we were to receive
or send interstellar messages, isn’t it the case that millions of years might elapse in
transmission, and that any such message might be from a long-dead civilisation? There
wouldn’t appear to be any possibility of a reply.
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| "As I understand it, they want an immediate answer. Only trouble is the message was sent 3 million years ago"
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SETI
But all this hasn’t stopped people trying. The search for life elsewhere in the
Universe has been going on now for over thirty years, ever since the so-called SETI - or
"Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" was launched in the United States. The name of
this project was later changed to HRMS ("High Resolution Microwave Survey"). The
SETI programme detected many apparent signals but almost all of these had to be
eliminated as having natural causes, only a handful remaining unexplained and unrepeated.
Let us imagine for a moment that we were able to contact extraterrestrial
intelligences, either in person or over interstellar distances. How would we communicate
being to being? If they use sound like ourselves, it might be quite possible to articulate each
others languages. It might be feasible to imitate these sounds mechanically by means of
sound-producing equipment. Voice synthesising is a possibility. However, machine
translation is impossible without a key, and even with one, the difficulties are far greater
than we might realise.
Science Fiction
The imagination of science fiction writers has run riot in this field. For instance, in
Harry Harrison’s "West of Eden", there are intelligent lizard-like creatures who use a
"gestalt" language. Gestalt is a German word used in philosophy in which it means thought
which starts with organised entire concepts rather than a whole lot of separate bits. Other
writers have imagined worlds whose inhabitants communicate by means of smell or by
speech combined with music, or by telepathy. As regards telepathy, most researchers who
have tried to test possible telepathic powers under laboratory conditions have, it seems,
produced little in the way of generally convincing results.
Human Language
Even in the field of human languages, there are huge differences in structure and
attitude that hinder communication. Some languages like Latin, Greek, Irish and Russian
have very complicated grammar in which the endings (and in Irish, the beginnings) of words
convey different meanings and nuances and related words have to agree with each other in
complicated ways. Different languages also reflect very different ideas and ways of
looking at the word.
The sounds of some languages are very difficult for non-natives to imitate. A
German, for example, often cannot distinguish between a short "a" and an "e" in
English and confuses "hat" and "head". An English-speaker on the other hand may be quite
unable to differentiate between "ch" and "ck" in German. We can’t imitate the click sounds in
Zulu and the language of the Bushmen of Africa. Hungarian seems very strange to us
because it apparently has no prepositions and no gender difference between "he", "she" or
"it". Japanese has no real future tense. Also the Japanese have two forms of their
language: one used by men and the other by women.
So we can have no idea what language might be like on other planets inhabited by
intelligent life, if such life exists. One science fiction writer imagines a planet where the
inhabitants once spoke many languages but have put them all together to form one language
in such a way that they retain and use all the words and all the systems of grammar of the
original separate languages. Such a combined language would be virtually unlearnable.
Interstellar Travel
It is difficult to imagine how interstellar travel could ever be a real possibility for
living beings, and the results of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have so far been
very disappointing. Probably the immense distances make any kind of contact impossible
now or in the future. But we can’t help feeling that there must be life somewhere else in
the Universe and that some of it must be intelligent. It’s fascinating to speculate how we
could go about communicating with such beings if there should ever be any contact
between us. I don’t think that Pioneer 10 carries the answer. If it does, we’ll never know
anything about it. Meanwhile we can go on searching, speculating and fantasising. We
wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.
Like to help SETI? Then try setiathome
You can contact Girvan at - carsfrn@iol.ie
Or visit Girvan's Home Page - Esperanto
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