With increasing frequency we’re seeing headlines trumpeting “earthlike planet discovered”—for example, this announcement from NASA, or this, this, or this. These worlds may be inhabited by intelligent life forms, and that raises the question, “How on earth (as it were) are we going to talk to them?”
SciFi makes the answer easy: there’s the Star Trek Universal Communicator©—pardon me, while I whip this thing out—or something off-the-shelf like Google translate, or the Rosetta Stone.
This month’s Scientific American suggests how linguists would talk to extraterrestrials. The approach is one you’d expect from positivists, and it is based on assumptions that work well for human languages:
- all humans are capable of language
- there are some linguistic universals, features every language shares
- people can learn to communicate with one another even if they don’t share a common language and don’t kill one another first.
That’s fine for communicating with another earthling, but by definition, space aliens aren’t going to be earthlings (even if in some movies they adopt a human form). And it’s also assuming they don’t kill us first. Or we don’t kill them.
So what if the aliens are intelligent but not human? Way back in 1972, NASA tackled this more-likely-but-still-not-going-to-happen scenario by attaching a plaque to the outside of its Pioneer space probe, “on the off chance that somewhere on the way it is intercepted by intelligent scientifically educated beings.”
The plaque was designed by the astronomers Carl Sagan (a real astronomer who also played one on TV) and Frank Drake, founder of SETI and an expert in communicating with interstellar beings (imagine the fieldwork, just imagine). It was drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan. The goal of the plaque was to give intelligent alien life forms a clue about our understanding of some scientific universals, and also how to find us.
But even these attempts to communicate with E.T. were based on some pretty shaky assumptions.
Here’s the NASA plaque:
And here’s what the plaque looked like on Pioneer 10 and 11, attached to the spacecrafts’ antenna struts:
Earthlings look at the plaque and see a man and a woman standing in front of the Pioneer spacecraft. This is how an art curator on our planet might describe the plaque:
The man’s eyes look directly at the observer, but he is not confrontational. His hand is raised as if to say, “I come in peace.” The woman looks at the man, perhaps approvingly. She is shorter, stands slightly farther back. Perhaps she is poised to defend the man if aliens attack. The Pioneer is drawn to scale, inviting the interpretation that the man and woman might have traveled here inside the craft. Go ahead, it seems to say, open the hatch, look inside. Beneath the couple is a schematic of the solar system, showing the spacecraft coming from the third planet from our sun. Oh, and the people are naked, suggesting not that this is a piece of NASAPorn, but that global warming means our world is now clothing optional.
Anonymous gift. 15.2 x 22.8 cm. Drypoint on gold anodized aluminum.
NASA describes the people more succinctly, as is befitting the scientifically-educated: “The physical makeup of the man and woman were determined from results of a computerized analysis of the average person in our civilization.” Which makes people reading that think to themselves, “If I had that body . . . .” or “AYFKM?” And the space agency makes clear that the plaque is not just an exercise in art appreciation: “Anyone from a scientifically educated civilization having enough knowledge of hydrogen would be able to translate the message.”
Maybe so, but in case your knowledge of hydrogen is not up to snuff, here’s a key to understanding the plaque. Basically, there’s a schematic of a hydrogen atom, which is the most common atom in the universe—not counting dark matter and black holes and string theory and other stuff that NASA didn’t know about in 1972—along with the binary representation of its atomic number. There is a binary representation of the number 8, and two lines marking the height of the woman. You can calculate the height of the woman by multiplying 8 by the wavelength of hydrogen (remember, we studied this last week?), which = 168 cm. Got that? The radial pattern on the left, with the sun at the center (you got that it was the sun at the center, right?), shows the binary representation of the fourteen pulsars of the galaxy (Toto, we’re not in the Delta Quadrant, any more). But the longest line, radiating all the way to the right, represents the distance of our sun from the center of the galaxy. Because, it does.
NASA notes that the man’s hand is raised in a gesture of peace, and suggests that the intelligent space alien might deduce the function of the opposable thumb. We are also told that the woman’s genitalia are depicted “more modestly.” And that Sagan had originally drawn the couple holding hands, but separated them so that intelligent space aliens would know they were two separate creatures, not one (plus, they’re just friends, you know, even though they’re naked). So apparently not all universals are universal.
Even with NASA’s clear separation of the couple, that’s a lot to take in, even for a scientifically-educated space alien conversant with the structure of hydrogen. But there are some significant obstacles to interpreting the plaque that NASA never even considered:
To understand the plaque, the scientifically-educated, knowledgeable about hydrogen space aliens would have to
- know that the Pioneer spacecraft was a spacecraft and not some stray piece of space junk, like an abandoned shopping cart, rolling aimlessly across the parking lot of space
- know that the plaque on the outside of the spacecraft was not a scratch caused by a meteor but something to be interpreted
- be able to see the design on the plaque with their optic-modules, or feel the etched lines with their tactometric sensors
That’s a tough set of assumptions to start off with, but wait, there’s more.
These educated space aliens might know all about hydrogen and pulsars and binary representation, but they’d also have to know some basic art-history concepts that are culturally learned and not innate, because no one is born knowing how to interpret a picture, even though we learn to do so very early on. For example, aliens would have to know
- something about perspective, like foreground, middle ground, and background, so they understand that the people are standing in front of the spacecraft, and not think the spacecraft is sort of growing out of the sides, tops, and backs of the people
- that they were looking at a picture of earthlings and not some notation system telling them that earthlings are waiting to give them fourteen million dollars if they send their banking particulars
- that the space inside the lines of the drawing of the earthlings is solid, not empty, and that humans are not like sculptures made out of wire hangers
- that an arrow represents direction
- that earthlings have movable limbs, like a fully-articulated action figure
- that a raised hand means "I come in peace," not "I have a question" or "Can I use the bathroom?"
In other words, it would take more than a knowledge of STEM subjects to understand the Pioneer plaque.
But then again, an advanced civilization of the kind that would find and interpret the Pioneer plaque or any other message we send out into space would be a civilization that valued the arts and sciences equally. And if they thought we didn’t share those values, that our culture was monolithic and not multiphonic, and that we had given up on the arts and humanities and music in the early twenty-first century because they were too expensive and anyway we'd rather watch cat videos on the internet, they might not think our civilization was worth exploring further, so they could either ignore us, or blow us all up.
