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 CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi 1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF TALKING TO ALIENS 1 Premodern METI 3 Modern METI 12 2 FROM CETI TO METI 19 Who Killed CETI? 20 Speaking of Communication 23 Do Aliens Speak English? 25 Extraterrestrial Cognition 32 3 ALIENS ON EARTH 37 Order and the Dolphin 40 Entropy and the Dolphin 49 4 COSMIC COMPUTERS AND INTERSTELLAR CATS 55 Language Corpora and ETAI 58 Cosmic OS 63 DNA as Executable Code 67 X CONTENTS 5 IS THERE A LANGUAGE OF THE UNIVERSE? 71 Will Extraterrestrials Understand Our Math? 77 SET(I) Theory 84 Embodied Extraterrestrial Intelligence 88 6 TOWARD A LINGUA COSMICA 93 Cosmic Calls 99 Lincos 2.0 104 7 HOW TO TALK IN SPACE 111 Physical Media 111 Microwave METI 119 OMETI 128 8 ART AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE 135 The Conventionality of Images 137 Music of the Spheres 144 9 THE MANY FUTURES OF METI 155 Shouting in a Jungle 156 Is METI Scientific? 161 Profligate Transmissions 163 Who Speaks for Earth? 167 Appendix A: The Arecibo Message 171 Appendix B: The Cosmic Call Transmissions 179 Appendix C: Lincos 193 Appendix D: The Lambda Calculus and Its Application to Astrolinguistics 203 References 225 Index 247 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 invalu- able 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 hypotheti- cal 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 plan- etary 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, biolo- gists, 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 2 CHAPTER 1 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 any- one could decipher the code, one would presume it would be the nine scientists who had given the most thought to the chal- lenges of interstellar communication. Drake received a single reply to his message. It was from Bar- ney 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, A BRIEF History OF TALKING TO ALIENS 3 for example, interpreted the binary string as a close approxima- tion 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 electri- cal 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 bet- ter. Today, Drake’s failed experiment in interstellar messaging remains an instructive lesson for contemporary METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts insofar as it calls atten- tion 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 mes- sages 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 phi- losophers 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 4 CHAPTER 1 novel written by the English bishop Frances Godwin. Posthu- mously published in 1638 under the pseudonym Domingo Gon- sales, 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 rea- sons thereof are especially two: First because it hath no affini- tie 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 pro- gram 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.

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