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. | 想像一下,你正在欧洲的某个首都城市点菜用餐,但对当地语言却一窍不通。服务员略懂英语,于是,你施尽浑身解数,终于在菜单上找到一道自己认识的菜,于是吃饭付钱。再想像一下,你在亚马逊丛林徒步时走错了路,饥肠辘辘地窜进某个村庄。村民们看着你,一脸迷茫,不知道该拿你如何是好。你表情夸张,嘴里咀嚼有声,村民却以为你正在念叨某种方言;你举起双手,想要投降,他们却以为你想要动手袭击。 如果没有共同的生活背景,沟通其实困难重重。放射性处置场地的隔离时间必须以数万年计。但是,就算是短短一千年前的英语,绝大多数的现代人也是无法读懂。各种组织只能想尽办法,为核废料创作各类警示标语。负责这项工作的委员会天马行空发挥创意,设计出高耸入云的水泥尖塔,再借用爱德华·蒙克的《呐喊》肖像,还画出颜色诡异的蓝色转基因植物。但是,谁也不能保证后人一定能够理解这些警示的含义。 制定核废料处理地警示信息的一些工作人员还面临更大的挑战:与外星生命沟通。而这正是《连线》杂志记者丹尼尔·奥伯豪斯 (Daniel Oberhaus) 新书《外星语言》的主题。 外星人是如何处理信息的?我们对此一无所知。先驱者 10 号和先驱者 11 号这两艘航天飞行器在 20 世纪 70 年代初各携带一块镀金铝板发射升空,板上刻有一男一女的裸体画像,并标示出地球的大致方位。这些都是非常基本的讯息,但前提是外星人能够看见这些讯息才行。这些飞行器被外星人找到的机会微乎其微,相比之下,从地球上发出的无线电广播能够以光速传播,更有可能与外星人取得联系。但是,在地面听广播调频必须正确,在太空上也是如此。怎样才能让外星人接收到正确的频率呢?先驱者上的铝板给出了提示。铝板上刻有基本的氢原子图像,其中的电磁波谱线每隔一定的时间即会跃迁,频率为 1,420 兆赫兹。氢是宇宙中数量最多的物质,人类希望这一草图能够起到电话号码的作用,让外星人与我们联系。 |