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. | 试想像,你正身处某个语言不通的欧洲大城市餐厅内准备用餐,但服务员只是略懂英语。为了点餐,你使出浑身解数,终于成功的在菜单上点了一些你认识的食物,然后用餐、买单。现在再换个场景,由于在登山过程中出了差错,因此你在筋疲力尽且饥肠辘辘的状态下意外闯入了亚马逊人的村落。这里的村民对你的要求完全没有概念,为了让村民明白你的需求,你只好模仿吃东西的声音,村民却误会你是在说母语。当你举起双手表示投降时,村民们却以为你要攻击他们。 无法共同理解的沟通是艰难的。打个比喻,含有辐射源物品都必须不被打扰的静置数万年。然而,考虑到大部分现代英语使用者都已经无法理解一千多年前的英语,因此有关机构在创建核废料警告时面临着重重困难。虽然负责这项工作的委员们都尽量考虑周全地给出各种警示,包括建立带有尖刺的高耸混凝土建筑物,使用爱德华·蒙克的画作“呐喊“作为标志,再到种植让人提高警惕的蓝色基因改造植物,但这些措施却都无法保证能给未来的人起到百分之一百的警示作用。 一些有着同样工作使命的人员更是面临着更大的挑战:和外星生物沟通。《连线》记者丹尼尔·奥伯豪斯所著的新书《外星语言》主题便是这一项挑战。 我们对于外星生物获知信息的方法可以说是毫无头绪。在70年代初,我们就已让两台航天器(先驱者10号及先驱者11号)携带两片有着人类裸体图像及地球在银河系里的简陋地图镀金铝板飞向太空。虽然这些都只是相当简单的信息,但却也是建立于外星人能够明白这些信息的假设上。这些航天器被外星人发现的几率极小,也许地球上能够以光速前进的无线电波更有可能被外星人发现。但星际无线电必然也如地球上的无线电一样,必需调到正确的频率双方才能互通。那么外星人们如何才能够调到和地球人一样的频率呢?先驱者所携带的镀金铝板氢原子磁极性将以频率1420兆赫的规则间隔翻转,因此这些氢原子基本图形能成为一个提示。基于氢是宇宙中含量最多的元素,所以希望这些氢原子基本图形能够成为类似电话号码的草图。 |