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. | 设想你自己置身于欧洲的某个大都市,不会说当地语言。服务员几乎不会说英语,但是你想方设法最终还是能够从菜单上点餐,吃完并付款。现在,想象另一个情景:你在徒步旅行时迷失了方向,来到了亚马逊丛林里的一座村庄,饥肠辘辘。那里的村民完全不知道如何跟你沟通。你发出咀嚼声,他们却误以为你在说原始语言;当你举起手投降时,他们却误以为你要发起攻击。 在没有共同语境的情况下,沟通变得极其困难。例如,存在放射污染的场所必须等到好几万年之后才会变成无害;然而,大多数现代英语母语者却无法理解哪怕只是一千年前的英语,因此,各个机构为制作核废料场警示语而绞尽脑汁。负责此事的委员会想尽各种办法,例如在高高的围墙上安装混泥土钉,采用画家爱德华·蒙克的画作《呐喊》,种植转基因植物,让植物变成令人惊恐的蓝色。可无论使用哪一种方法,都无法保证将来不过时。 在这些制作核废料场警示语的人群中,有些人还面临着更大的挑战:跟外星人交流。这也是《连线》杂志记者丹尼尔·奥伯豪斯的新书《外星语言》一书的主题。 人类尚不知晓外星人是如何接受信息的。1970年代初,在行星探测器“先驱者10号”和“先驱者11号”携带的镀金铝板上绘有人类的裸体图像,并标明了地球的位置——这些都是很原始的材料,但前提是外星人能看到。因为,这样的物件被发现的几率微乎其微。而从地球发送的无线电广播以光速传播,更有可能接触到外星人。但是,就好比地球上的无线电广播设备需要调到正确的频道才能接受到信号一样,外星上也不例外。外星人如何才能刚好调到正确的频道呢?先驱者行星探测器上的镀金铝板给我们提供了启示,铝板上刻有一个氢原子的图像,磁极性以1420兆赫兹的频率定期跳转。由于氢原子是宇宙中含量最丰富的元素,因此,这幅图可能充当类似电话号码的角色。 |