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. | 試想像你在某個歐洲國家首都用餐,雖然你不懂當地語言,待應生也只懂少許中英文,但千方百計下,你還是成功點菜吃飽結賬。好了,再想像一下你在一次遠足時遇難,大難不死卻流落到一個亞馬遜部落,快要餓死。部落裡的人完全不能理解你的一舉一動。你模仿咀嚼聲音卻被誤會成是一種原始語言;你舉手投降卻被誤會為發動攻擊。 沒有共同語境的溝通十分困難。以一個有輻射危險的地點為例,我們需要保證它未來數萬年生人勿近,但管理人員對於該豎立一個怎樣的警示毫無頭緒。單單是一千年前的英語,大部份現代人已經不能理解。負責這些工作的委員會提出了無數方案,由設置從地面高高突起的水泥錐,到掛起愛德華·孟克的《吶喊》,或者種植基因改造成意味著危險的藍色植物,沒有一個能夠保證在未來的時間長河中做到萬無一失。 參與構思這些放射廢料地點警示的人,也曾參與一個更大的挑戰:與外星生命溝通。這也是雜誌《連線》(WIRED) 作家丹尼爾‧奧巴豪斯(Daniel Oberhaus) 新書《天外語言》的主題。 沒有人知道外星生物如何接收資訊。七十年代早期發射的太空船先鋒10號 (Pioneer 10) 及先鋒11號 (Pioneer 11) 上有一對鍍金鋁板,展示了裸露身體的人類和一幅指向地球的粗略地圖。這已經是最淺易的信息但也要求外星人能夠視物。外星生命找到這對鋁板的機率十分渺茫,相較起來,他們顯然更有可能接收到以光速從地球向外發送的廣播。不過,就如地球上的收音機要調到正確的頻道,星際間的通訊也不例外。外星人怎知道調哪個頻率才對?先鋒號鋁板上一幅氫原子(Hydrogen atom) 的簡單圖案就是提示。氫原子的磁極以1,420兆赫茲(MHz) 的固定頻率變更。氫原子是宇宙中含量最豐富的元素,科學家寄望這幅圖案能起到像電話號碼一般的作用。 |