Would we ever be able to decode a signal from E.T?
Would we ever be able to decode an alien message?
In this video, we are going to answer this question.
Spoiler: it will be a long journey.
Simple answers are not allowed!
On 4th February 2008, NASA sent a radio transmission to a star.
They know that this signal, or if you want this message would have arrived after 431
years.
Who sent this message will no longer be here.
The radio transmission was directed towards Polaris, the North Star.
But why did NASA decide to send it?
And what did the signal contain?
NASA decided to send it to ...communicate with aliens.
We have always wanted to understand if we're alone or not in the universe.
There is someone out there?
NASA wants to find out.
But we also desire to leave a signature of our presence.
We want someone out there to know we were here for a while, in the vastness of space
and time.
Have you ever tried to imagine how many species tried to communicate with us, but they never
succeeded?
Imagine how frustrating that would be.
Out of this perspective, our lives seem meaningless.
Humankind had always strived to find a sense of its own existence.
NASA is made by humans.
That's exactly why they decided to send a radio transmission to another star, hoping
to find a receiver.
Just for clarity, if the original signal takes about 400 years to reach the star, and if
some kind of alien is able to receive it first, read it, and then sending back another signal,
we are expecting to receive it... in about 800 years from now.
This is a huge amount of time for us, but still little time compared to cosmic dynamics.
The signal contained a song.
It was “Across the Universe” by the Beatles.
Do you know that song?
They thought it was the perfect song to celebrate, on one hand, the NASA 50th birthday, and on
the other hand, the song's 40th birthday.
But are we sure an alien could take a listen to that song?
Let's see what can we say about it.
There is of course a chance for us not to be alone in the universe.
Some aliens could indeed exist, and also they could be intelligent species.
Let's suppose they are able to receive and send back interstellar radio signals...how
can we be sure they would understand what we are trying to communicate?
It's been almost 70 years that humanity is trying to find scientific proof of the existence
of intelligent life other than us in the galaxy, and we do so by looking for radio signals
or other communication forms.
One of the main problems is of course...how do we know that signal was set with purpose?
It could simply be a natural signal, coming from an unknown stellar object.
Another huge problem is: suppose we receive a beautiful signal and we know for sure it
comes from aliens.
Will we ever be able to understand it?
Will we ever be able to decipher it?
Let's take as an example the Beatles song.
You don't need to decipher a particular language, since music is universal, and if one plays
a melody, everybody can say: someone is playing a melody.
Even if different people from different countries have different musical tastes, they will all
recognize it as a melody.
But are we sure aliens can hear the music?
We own an auditory system that is unique.
In fact, it is sensible to a limited range of frequencies, and it is the consequence
of an evolutionary process made possible by the fact that...we live on Earth.
The Earth is a planet with an atmosphere characterized by certain gases, which we find to be at a
certain temperature and a certain pressure.
All of this depends of course on the distance of the planet to the Sun, and so on.
If only one of these parameters is different, it would probably result in a drastically
different auditory system.
So it is very likely that aliens don't have the same frequency range sensitiveness as
ours.
So trying to communicate by means of music would be a waste of time.
Even if we think about animals on earth, different animals have different auditory systems, and
other organisms have pretty different and various sensorial organs.
Across the universe sounds very different if you are a dolphin or a bat.
So things are more complicated than this.
We can't communicate through music.
So we apparently need a common language for the entire cosmos, that all forms of intelligent
life could be able to understand.
Is it possible to imagine such a language?
Well, it is not so clear and linguists do not agree among themselves.
But maybe some hope is given by math.
Galileo himself said that math is the language of the universe.
Actually, we have already sent some sort of “math message” towards other stars.
It was 1974.
It was the most famous message in the history of humanity: it was sent by the Arecibo radiotelescope.
It contained a sequence of 1679 binary cyphers, and if an alien will ever be able to receive
it, he would have hard times trying to decipher it.
First, it should be able to notice that 1679 can be decomposed in only one way, in the
product of 23 times 73.
Then he would have to guess that the ones and the zeros that compose the message must
be arranged in a rectangular matrix of 23 rows and 73 columns.
Then they would have to switch on the right pixels and try to interpret the resultant
figure.
This, of course, is very difficult.
Imagine you to be that alien.
Do you think it would be an easy job?
I honestly don't think so.
A graphic showing the message is reproduced here.
1.
The first set of symbols (coloured Red) represent the numbers from 1 to 10 reading from right
to left.
2.
The cluster in the centre (coloured Blue) codes the atomic numbers for certain elements.
3.
These (coloured Green) patterns represent formulas for sugars and bases in nucleotides
of DNA.
4.
The (coloured Blue) vertical bar in the 5.
centre specifies the number of nucleotides in DNA.
6.
The double helix of DNA is represented by the (coloured Red) curving lines that go from
the (sugars/bases) formulas to the human figure.
7.
The next set of symbols (coloured Brown) represent the human population (on the left) on Earth,
a figure of a human (in the centre) and (on the right) the height of a human.
8.
Our Solar System (coloured Red) is displayed next.
The dot representing Earth is displaced toward the human being.
9.
The Arecibo telescope dish (coloured Blue) is transmitting the message (coloured Green)
near the bottom of the picture.
The last set of symbols (coloured Blue) give the diameter of the Arecibo Radio Telescope.
By the way, we should also note that there exist human languages we are still not able
to understand.
And among these weird and strange ancient languages, the only symbols we know how to
decipher are numbers.
So it supports the theory of math as a universal language.
In 1960 however, mathematician Hans Freudenthal invented a language, called Linkous.
It was supposed to be some sort of cosmic language, and all communication was supposed
to be based on this Linkous.
Every “word” consisted of radio impulses and gradually more complex sequences.
Everything started with a math and logic dictionary containing elementary operations and then
more theoretical and abstract notions.
In the film “Contact”, the message received from aliens follows a similar logic.
However, even mah-based communication requires a certain grade of intelligence.
We can't use, for example, Linkous to communicate with elephants!
In human languages, we have concepts like nouns, verbs, singular and plural, and words
to express the passage of time.
But are these words a result of our neuroanatomy?
Do we communicate about time in a certain way because we are inhabiting a rather flat
portion of space-time?
Do we have the concepts of numbers because we see ourselves as distinct entities from
one another?
We can't peer into alien psychology and understanding - so right now, we just don't know.
Similarities that connect human languages over time may not connect our languages and
that of ET.
Another last problem of detecting alien signals is linked to instrumentation limits.
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A message would be faint.
There is the issue of exposure time, which is especially an issue in the radio band.
When looking for signals, astronomers take an exposure that lasts minutes, hours or weeks.
It's like you going up on a hill and you want to take a picture of the city at night.
You put your camera on a tripod and you open the shutter for 30 seconds or a minute.
At that point, all the modulation, the message if you will, gets smeared out!
For example, you can see stoplights, but they would be simultaneously red, yellow and green
because you've had the shutter open for a minute.
It would be the same with an alien signal.
Because we are taking a long exposure of the message, individual words would be smeared
together.
We might be able to tell that there is a signal there, but nothing more - that is until we
build a bigger telescope.
So, at this point, we seem to have an answer to our initial question.
Would we ever be able to decode a language from ET?
Who knows.
Language is more than just a method of communication.
It incorporates our culture, our history, our loves and our passions.
Language models our bodies and how we think.
It speaks to what is important to us.
If we receive a signal, we may never be able to decode it, but maybe, seeing what it looks
like might give us more insight into who we are as a species on this little planet called
Earth.
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