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. | Zamislite da večerate u jednoj od evropskih prestonica, a ne znate lokalni jezik. Konobar slabo govori engleski, ali nekako ipak uspevate da sa menija naručite nešto što vam je poznato, pojedete i platite. A sada, umesto toga, zamislite da se, posle neuspelog planinarenja, mrtvi gladni, nađete u jednom amazonskom selu. Ljudi u tom selu nemaju pojma šta da rade sa vama. Vi mljackate ustima i oni pomisle da je to vaš primitivni jezik. Kada podignete ruke u znak predaje, oni pomisle da ćete ih napasti. Komuniciranje bez zajedničkog jezika je teško. Na primer, radioaktivna mesta se ne smeju posećivati tokom narednih desetina hiljada godina; pa ipak, budući da je engleski jezik od pre samo 1000 godina nerazumljiv većini ljudi koji govore savremeni engleski, agencije se muče da sastave upozorenja na opasnosti od nuklearnog otpada. Komiteti, odgovorni za to, predlažu sve i svašta, počev od visokih betonskih zašiljenih kula pa do "Krika" Edvarda Munka, do genetski modifikovanih biljaka koje poprime plavu boju da ukažu na opasnost. Ništa od ovoga nam ne garantuje bezbednu budućnost. Neki od istih ovih ljudi, koji su radili na porukama koje upozoravaju na otpad, prihvatili su još veći izazov: komuniciranje sa vanzemaljcima. Ovo je tema nove knjige Danijela Oberhausa, novinara Vajrda, "Jezici vanzemaljaca". Ništa ne znamo o tome kako vanzemaljci mogu da prime poruke. Dve ploče poslate ranih sedamdesetih u dve vasionske letelice, Pajonier-u 10 i 11, prikazuju naga ljudska bića i jednu grubu mapu Zemlje-najosnovnije stvari, uz pretpostavku, da i to vanzemaljci mogu videti. Pošto postoji beskrajno mala mogućnost da te letelice budu pronađene, veća je verovatnoća da će radio talasi, koji putuju brzinom svetlosti, emitovani sa Zemlje, stupiti u neki kontakt. Ali, baš kao što se zemaljski radio može podesiti na željenu frekvenciju, sigurno da to mogu i vanzemaljci. Kako bi vanzemaljci mogli da nađu ispravnu frekvenciju? Ploča sa Pajonier-a daje nagoveštaj u obliku osnovnog dijagrama koji prikazuje vodonikov atom, čiji se magnetni polovi obrću svetluca u pravilnim intervalima, na frekvenciji od 1,420MHz. Pošto je vodonik najprisutniji elemenat u univerzumu, postoji nada da će ova skica poslužiti kao neka vrsta telefonskog broja. |