Imagine dining in a European capital where you do not know the local language. The waiter speaks little English, but by hook or by crook you manage to order something on the menu that you recognise, eat and pay for. Now picture instead that, after a hike goes wrong, you emerge, starving, in an Amazonian village. The people there have no idea what to make of you. You mime chewing sounds, which they mistake for your primitive tongue. When you raise your hands to signify surrender, they think you are launching an attack.
Communicating without a shared context is hard. For example, radioactive sites must be left undisturbed for tens of thousands of years; yet, given that the English of just 1,000 years ago is now unintelligible to most of its modern speakers, agencies have struggled to create warnings to accompany nuclear waste. Committees responsible for doing so have come up with everything from towering concrete spikes, to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, to plants genetically modified to turn an alarming blue. None is guaranteed to be future-proof.
Some of the same people who worked on these waste-site messages have also been part of an even bigger challenge: communicating with extraterrestrial life. This is the subject of “Extraterrestrial Languages”, a new book by Daniel Oberhaus, a journalist at Wired.
Nothing is known about how extraterrestrials might take in information. A pair of plaques sent in the early 1970s with Pioneer 10 and 11, two spacecraft, show nude human beings and a rough map to find Earth—rudimentary stuff, but even that assumes aliens can see. Since such craft have no more than an infinitesimal chance of being found, radio broadcasts from Earth, travelling at the speed of light, are more likely to make contact. But just as a terrestrial radio must be tuned to the right frequency, so must the interstellar kind. How would aliens happen upon the correct one? The Pioneer plaque gives a hint in the form of a basic diagram of a hydrogen atom, the magnetic polarity of which flips at regular intervals, with a frequency of 1,420MHz. Since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, the hope is that this sketch might act as a sort of telephone number. | Predstavljajte si obrok zunaj v evropski prestolnici, kjer ne govorite lokalnega jezika. Natakar lomi angleščino, in nekako le uspete naročiti, pojesti in plačati z jedilnika jed, ki jo poznate. Zdaj pa si predstavljajte, da se po neuspeli turi sestradani znajdete v vasi sredi Amazonije. Ljudje nimajo pojma, kaj naj si o vas mislijo. Posnemate zvoke žvečenja, ki jih imajo vaščani za vaš primitivni jezik. Ko v znak predaje dvignete roke, mislijo, da se pripravljate na napad. Težko se je sporazumevati brez skupnega konteksta. Denimo radioaktivnim področjem se je treba izogibati nekaj deset tisoč let, agencije pa imajo težave z oblikovanjem opozoril o radioaktivnih odpadkih, saj angleščine, kakršno so govorili pred tisoč leti, danes ne razume več niti večina sodobnih govorcev. Za to odgovorne komisije so predlagale vse mogoče, od visokih betonskih konic in slike »Krik« Edvarda Muncha, do genetsko spremenjenih rastlin, ki se obarvajo v alarmantno modro. A za nič od tega nimamo zagotovila, da bo razumljeno tudi v prihodnosti. Nekateri ljudje, ki so delali na teh sporočilih o onesnaženih krajih, so sodelovali pri še večjem izzivu: komuniciranju z zunajzemeljskim življenjem. To je tudi tema nove knjige »Zunajzemeljski jeziki« Daniela Oberhausa, novinarja revije Wired. Nič ne vemo o načinu, na katerega Nezemljani sprejemajo informacije. Par ploščic, ki sta jih v zgodnjih sedemdesetih letih v vesolje ponesli plovili Pioneer 10 in 11, prikazuje naga človeška bitja in grob zemljevid poti do Zemlje – zelo osnovno, vendar tudi to vsebuje predpostavko, da Nezemljani vidijo. Ker imajo taka plovila le neskončno malo možnosti, da bi jih kdo našel, imajo več možnosti za stik radijska oddajanja, ki z Zemlje potujejo s svetlobno hitrostjo. A zemeljski radio mora biti nastavljen na pravo frekvenco, in enako velja za medzvezdnega. Kako bi lahko nanjo naleteli Nezemljani? Na ploščici s sonde Pioneer je namig v obliki osnovnega diagrama vodikovega atoma, katerega magnetna polarnost se spreminja v rednih presledkih s frekvenco 1420 MHz. Vodik je najpogostejši element v vesolju, zato upamo, da bi lahko ta skica predstavljala nekakšno telefonsko številko. |