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. | 想象一下,你在一个不懂当地语言的欧洲首都用餐。服务员几乎不会说英语,但你想尽办法点了菜单上你认识的菜,吃了,付了钱。现在想象一下,一次远足出了问题,你饿着肚子出现在亚马逊的一个村庄。那里的人根本不知道你是干什么的。你模仿咀嚼的声音,他们会误认为是你的原始语言。当你举手示意投降时,他们认为你是在发起进攻。 没有共享背景信息的沟通是困难的。例如,放射性核废料储存场所必须保持数万年不受干扰;然而现在,考虑到仅仅 1000 年前的英语对大多数说现代英语的人来说都是难以理解的,各机构一直在努力为核废料拟定警告标识。负责这项工作的委员会想出了各种各样的方案,从高耸的混凝土尖塔,到画家爱德华•蒙克的画作《呐喊》,再到经过基因改造使之变成令人震惊的蓝色的植物。没有一个方案可以保证是万无一失的。 这些核废料场的一些工作人员表示他们还面临着一个更大的挑战:与外星生命进行沟通。这是《连线》杂志记者丹尼尔•奥伯豪斯的新书《外星语言》的主题。 关于外星人如何获取信息,我们还一无所知。上世纪 70 年代初,“先锋 10 号”和“11 号”两艘宇宙飞船搭载了一对牌匾,上面展示了裸体的人类,还有一张寻找基本的东西的——地球的粗略地图,但需假定外星人能够看到。由于这种飞行器被发现的机会微乎其微,所以来自地球的以光速飞行的无线电广播更有可能与之取得联系。但是,就像地球上的无线电必须调到合适的频率一样,星际间的无线电也必须调到合适的频率。外星人如何碰巧找到正确的频率呢?先驱号的牌匾以氢原子基本图的形式给出了一个提示,氢原子的磁极按一定的间隔翻转,频率为 1420 兆赫。因为氢是宇宙中最丰富的元素,所以希望这张草图能充当某种电话号码。 |