Extraterrestrial Languages

Extraterrestrial Languages

Extraterrestrial Languages

Daniel Oberhaus

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and Futura Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Oberhaus, Daniel, author.

Title: Extraterrestrial languages / Daniel Oberhaus.

Other titles: Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001439 | ISBN 9780262043069 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Life on other planets. | Interstellar communication. | Space and time in language. | Language and languages. | Extraterrestrial anthropology. | Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Study group : U.S.)

Classification: LCC QB54 .O225 2019 | DDC 576.8/39014—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001439

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

For my parents, Chris and Tenley

d_r0

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 A Brief History of Talking to Aliens

Premodern METI

Modern METI

2 From CETI to METI

Who Killed CETI?

Speaking of Communication

Do Aliens Speak English?

Extraterrestrial Cognition

3 Aliens on Earth

Order and the Dolphin

Entropy and the Dolphin

4 Cosmic Computers and Interstellar Cats

Language Corpora and ETAI

Cosmic OS

DNA as Executable Code

5 Is There a Language of the Universe?

Will Extraterrestrials Understand Our Math?

SET(I) Theory

Embodied Extraterrestrial Intelligence

6 Toward a Lingua Cosmica

Cosmic Calls

Lincos 2.0

7 How to Talk in Space

Physical Media

Microwave METI

OMETI

8 Art as a Universal Language

The Conventionality of Images

Music of the Spheres

9 The Many Futures of METI

Shouting in a Jungle

Is METI Scientific?

Profligate Transmissions

Who Speaks for Earth?

Appendix A: The Arecibo Message

Appendix B: The Cosmic Call Transmissions

Appendix C: Lincos

Appendix D: The Lambda Calculus and Its Application to Astrolinguistics

References

Index

Acknowledgments

There is only a single author named on the cover of this book, but I’m afraid that is quite misleading. The book you hold in your hands could not have been written without the expert insight of Sheri Wells-Jensen, Yvan Dutil, Carl DeVito, John Elliott, Charles Cockell, Brenda McCowan, Eric Korpela, Richard Braastad, Seth Shostak, and Marlin Schuetz. I am indebted to you all. I would also like to thank Marc Lowenthal, Anthony Zannino, and Judith Feldmann of the MIT Press for their invaluable guidance (and patience) while shepherding this text from inception to publication. Finally, I offer a special thanks to my family, friends, and colleagues for their inexhaustible support and encouragement.

1

A Brief History of Talking to Aliens

In 1961, nine of the smartest individuals in the United States received a rather unusual letter in the mail. It consisted of a long string of binary digits and a short message: Here is a hypothetical message received from outer space. It contains 551 zeros and ones. What does it mean? Neither the sender nor his recipients knew it at the time, but this letter would later serve as the prototype for the first message for extraterrestrial intelligence ever broadcast into space. Its initial test run on Earth, however, was a total failure.

The prototype interstellar message was created by the planetary astronomer Frank Drake in the wake of a conference he organized at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where he had concluded Project Ozma, the first microwave search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), only a few months earlier. The three-day conference was dedicated to assessing the viability of scientific SETI and was attended by a small cohort of leading physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers who had demonstrated an interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It was a landmark event that shaped the trajectory of SETI for decades to come. Yet in the months following the historic meeting, Drake realized that if SETI were successful and detected a signal from outer space, this would raise a serious issue that had been neglected at the conference: how to design a response.

So he set about designing an experimental interstellar message that consisted of a string of 551 binary digits that could be arranged so that their bit-values formed pictures. The number 551 is semiprime, a design feature Drake hoped wouldn’t escape the notice of an extraterrestrial—or his human test subjects. The number served as a sort of instruction manual for how to arrange the string of bits so that it formed a 19×29 bit array, which would reveal several bit images. These images depicted things like numbers and a human figure, but many of the images required a great deal of imaginative interpretation. Drake wanted to know whether there was any chance an extraterrestrial would understand the significance of his message, so he sent it to each of the attendees at the Green Bank conference as a test. If anyone could decipher the code, one would presume it would be the nine scientists who had given the most thought to the challenges of interstellar communication.

Drake received a single reply to his message. It was from Barney Oliver, the director of Hewlett Packard Labs, who responded with his own semiprime binary string. When Drake translated Oliver’s reply into a bit array, he found that it contained a simple and inspiring message: a picture of a martini glass with an olive in it. Although Oliver had understood the format of Drake’s message, he had failed to interpret even the simple numbering scheme coded in the message. The inability of the Green Bank attendees to decipher Drake’s experimental interstellar message was not for want of intellect, however. Drake later sent the message to a few Nobel laureates, all of whom either failed to decipher it at all or arrived at incorrect interpretations. One physicist, for example, interpreted the binary string as a close approximation of the quantum numbers that describe the arrangement of electrons in an iron atom. It was only when Drake submitted the message to a magazine for amateur code breakers that an electrical engineer from Brooklyn wrote to him and demonstrated that he had correctly deciphered most of the message.

Given the difficulty that some of the brightest Earthlings encountered when trying to decipher the bitmap, it seems unlikely that an extraterrestrial intelligence would fare any better. Today, Drake’s failed experiment in interstellar messaging remains an instructive lesson for contemporary METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts insofar as it calls attention to the multitude of latent conventions that haunt human cognition and communication. If an interstellar message has any hope of being understood by an extraterrestrial recipient, these conventions must be identified and excised from the messages and replaced with elements that can be presumed to be universally understood by any intelligent mind. The design of a universal communication system has vexed some of the greatest minds in history, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that the technological means became available to put these systems into practice by broadcasting them across the cosmos.

Premodern METI

Prior to the Enlightenment, the problem of extraterrestrial communication was mostly framed in ecclesiastical terms, as philosophers struggled to recreate the perfect language of God (Eco 1995). Nevertheless, a handful of Renaissance works directly addressed the difficulties of communicating with extraterrestrial life. Perhaps the most notable example is Man in the Moone, a novel written by the English bishop Frances Godwin. Posthumously published in 1638 under the pseudonym Domingo Gonsales, the book recounts the adventures of the author, who is carried to the moon by geese and encounters an extraterrestrial race that speaks in a musical language. Gonsales notes that the difficulty of that language is not to be conceived, and the reasons thereof are especially two: First because it hath no affinitie with any other ever I heard. Secondly, because it consisteth not so much of words and letters, as of tunes and uncouth sounds, that no letters can expresse. For you have few words, but there are consisting of tunes onely, so as if they list they will utter their minds by tunes without words (quoted in Davies 1967). Godwin’s novel is remarkable for anticipating the difficulties involved with interstellar messaging more than three hundred years before the first message was sent into the cosmos as well as the role of music in facilitating extraterrestrial communication.

By the nineteenth century, a handful of mathematicians began to develop programs meant specifically for communicating with extraterrestrials that were thought to exist on the moon or Mars (Ball 1901; Raulin-Cerceau 2010). The first scientific program for messaging extraterrestrials is widely attributed to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who reportedly suggested creating a massive visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem in the Siberian tundra. This visual proof was to consist of a right triangle bordered on each side by squares and would be created by planting rows of trees for the borders and filling the interior of the space with wheat. Despite the minimalism of the design, Gauss’s proposal was information rich. It would demonstrate that our species had mastered large-scale agriculture as well as basic mathematics, geometry, and logic. Gauss’s idea appears to have influenced the Austrian astronomer Joseph Johann von Littrow, who later advanced his own plan for establishing contact with the moon-dwellers that involved digging massive trenches in the Sahara Desert in various shapes. These trenches would be filled with water and surfaced with kerosene, which would be set alight to send flaming geometrical messages to our cosmic neighbors. Suffice it to say, neither Gauss’s nor von Littrow’s outlandish communication schemes were ever put to the test.

Like non-Euclidean geometry and many of the other ideas that Gauss attempted to claim credit for, the attribution of this interplanetary communication system to Gauss is contested. Many nineteenth-century sources that mention the idea differ significantly in its details and none of them cite where Gauss had actually written about this plan (Crowe 1999). Still, personal letters indicate that the mathematician was fascinated by the idea of communicating with aliens that were supposed to live on the moon. Indeed, Gauss’s desire to communicate with extraterrestrials was a motivating factor in his design of the heliotrope, a mirror that could be used to communicate over long distances using reflected light. In his design, Gauss planned to use an array of sixteen mirrors to get in touch with our neighbors on the moon, a feat he estimated would be a discovery greater than that of America (Crowe 1999). Although we now know the lack of a lunar atmosphere precludes the possibility of even microbial life, Gauss was correct in his estimation of the importance of extraterrestrial contact.

By the end of the nineteenth century, enthusiasm about the prospect of establishing contact with extraterrestrials had reached a fever pitch in Europe, and Paris had established itself as the intellectual capital for interplanetary communication. In 1874, the eccentric French poet and inventor Charles Cros petitioned the French government for funding to build a giant mirror that would use focused sunlight to burn messages into the Martian and Venusian deserts as a means of communicating with the extraterrestrials that he believed inhabited those planets. Alternatively, Cros later suggested that mirrors could be used in conjunction with electric lights to establish an interplanetary communication network. He envisioned a Morse-code-style system that would allow Earthlings to communicate basic ideas about numbers to establish a common language with the Martians (Moore 2000). Around the same time, Nicolas Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer with a notable interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, also advocated using large mirrors to communicate with life on other planets. Rather than adopt Cros’s telegraphic system, however, Flammarion envisioned an interplanetary messaging system based on large-scale arrays of reconfigurable electric lamps. According to Flammarion, the ability to change the shapes of the lights was critical because it would demonstrate to the Martians that the signal was artificial (Cerceau 2015).

Unsurprisingly, these exotic plans to contact extraterrestrials were ripe fodder for the humorists of the era such as the French playwright Tristan Bernard, who wrote a story about the first astronomers to receive a message from Mars. After receiving the message, the astronomers blanket the Sahara Desert with a reply that reads I beg your pardon? only to have the Martians reply, Nothing. Vexed at the Martians for their terse answer, the astronomers write another message in the Sahara which reads What are you making signs for then? to which the Martians reply, We’re not talking to you, we’re talking to the Saturnians (Reddy 2011). Despite the satirical jabs, however, establishing contact with extraterrestrials was considered by many to be a legitimate pursuit, albeit one that depended on the patronage of wealthy xenophiles. In a testament to the strength of this belief in extraterrestrial life, the wealthy French socialite Anne Goguet established a prize for the first person to establish interplanetary communication in 1891. The contest was included in her will at the urging of her son Pierre Guzman, who was deeply interested in Flammarion’s work on extraterrestrials. According to Goguet’s will, the Prix Guzman would award 100,000 francs (equivalent to about $500,000 USD today) for the first demonstration of interplanetary communication. Notably, establishing contact with Martians wasn’t eligible for the prize, as Goguet considered the existence of extraterrestrials on the Red Planet to be sufficiently well known.

For better or worse, none of the early French proposals for interplanetary communication ever came to fruition, but they are remarkable for explicitly addressing many of the conceptual problems associated with modern extraterrestrial communication, even if many of the early plans focused on practical issues of interplanetary communication systems rather than the content of the messages. The first attempt at a complete program for interplanetary communication was designed in 1896 by the English polymath Francis Galton, who put forth a theory of extraterrestrial message construction based on Morse code. Inspired by the Mars craze that had swept Europe in the late nineteenth century after the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli announced he had discovered canals on the planet’s surface, Galton started toying with the idea of communicating with the Martians. Unlike the challenges associated with communicating with the blind or deaf on Earth, Galton observed, interplanetary communication does not have the luxury of feedback, which meant that "signals have to be devised that are intrinsically intelligible. Galton described his plans for extraterrestrial communication in an entertaining story about the first humans to receive Martian signals, which would consist of minute scintillations of light proceeding from a single, well-defined spot on the surface of Mars. The Martian signaling pattern envisioned by Galton consisted of light flashes of three different durations that could be combined to form letters and words, much like Morse code. In Galton’s fable, the Martian message begins with a series of lines to indicate the start of the message, before moving on to the notion of identity and arithmetical operators. Next, the message describes the five principle planets by their average distance from the Sun, rotation period, and circumference. With this foundation words consisting of groupings of three or more signals could be used for a picture writing to extend the system to more complicated concepts. Although it relied heavily on the conventions of Morse code, which presumably wouldn’t be known to an extraterrestrial intelligence, Galton’s system for communicating with extraterrestrials is remarkable for its recognition that an optimal extraterrestrial message would be self-interpreting, as well as for its systematic explanation of astronomical facts through a language" of basic arithmetic and pictures. Indeed, Galton’s idea of transmitting pictures was given a second life two decades later in a proposal that used the dots and dashes of Morse code as the basis of an interplanetary picture-messaging system. In this proposal, groups of twenty signals (either a dot or a dash) would serve as a line of an image, creating the equivalent of a bitmap (Nieman and Nieman 1920).

The idea of using mirrors to establish contact with Martians continued well into the early twentieth century (Mercier 1899; Pickering 1909), but Guglielmo Marconi’s pioneering work on radio communication promised a more effective way of communicating across the cosmos. In 1899, a strange concurrence of events laid the foundation for modern METI, even if it wasn’t recognized at the time. That year, Marconi managed to transmit a single letter via radio across the English Channel, while Nikola Tesla, infamous for his own forays into experimental radio technologies, recorded in his notes that he had detected a radio signal from Mars at his laboratory in Colorado. I have observed electrical actions, which have appeared inexplicable, Tesla wrote in a letter to the New York Red Cross. Faint and uncertain though they were, they have given me a deep conviction and foreknowledge, that ere long all human beings on this globe, as one, will turn their eyes to the firmament above, with feelings of love and reverence, thrilled by the glad news: ‘Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote. It reads: one ... two ... three ... (Tesla 1900).

Despite Tesla’s conviction that he had received the first interplanetary message—and it is worth noting that this alleged Martian message began by counting—it is likely that he had actually heard radio emissions from storms on Jupiter, an important lesson about the difficulties involved in distinguishing artificial and natural radio emissions (Corum and Corum 2003). Although there is no indication that Tesla ever received a follow-up message from Mars, he remained preoccupied with the idea of interplanetary communication for the rest of his career. By 1909, he had rejected the various French proposals for using mirrors to facilitate extraterrestrial contact in favor of using one of his wireless radio transmitters, which he had used to send a powerful current around the globe. According to Tesla, the same principles could be harnessed to send a message to our planetary neighbors. Indeed, he claimed to have already produced disturbances on Mars incomparably more powerful than could be attained by any light reflectors during his experiments over the course of 1899 and 1900. Electrical science is now so far advanced that our ability of flashing a signal to a planet is experimentally demonstrated, Tesla wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. The question is, when will humanity witness that great triumph. This is easily answered. The moment we obtain absolute evidences that an intelligent effort is being made in some other world to this effect, interplanetary transmission of intelligence can be considered as an accomplished fact. A primitive understanding can be reached quickly without difficulty. A complete exchange of ideas is a greater problem, but susceptible to a solution (Tesla 1909).

The possibility of using radio to wirelessly contact inhabitants on other planets also captured the imagination of Marconi, who allegedly conducted several experiments to that end. In 1919, the New York Times reported that Marconi pioneered interstellar communication in 1909 when he sent a radio signal into the universe in the hopes that it would facilitate contact with extraterrestrial intelligence in other solar systems (Radio to the Stars, Marconi’s Hope). If Marconi did in fact undertake this experiment with the intention of contacting extraterrestrials, it is unlikely that his transmitter was broadcasting at a high