Nick Richardson’s LRB review (18 June 2020; archived) of Extraterrestrial Languages, by Daniel Oberhaus, is mostly about recent attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials, which we discussed a couple of years ago, but it begins with a few paragraphs about earlier ideas, which I found charming enough to post:
The hero of The Man in the Moone, a novel written in the late 1620s by the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin, is carried to the moon in a sky chariot pulled by a flock of wild swans. He spends the next few months among the peaceful ‘Lunars’ and gains a measure of fluency in their language, which ‘consisteth not so much of words and letters’ as of melodies ‘that no letters can expresse’. Godwin’s cosmonaut, Gonsales, in many ways had an easy time of it. He could point at a swan or a star and the Lunars would whistle one tune or another. Tune by tune Gonsales pieced together his Lunar vocabulary. But almost the only thing we know for certain about aliens is that they don’t live close enough to see us pointing. We know of a handful of possibly habitable planets, but none is less than four light years away – or 24 trillion miles. And the Lunars aren’t that unlike humans: they’re tall but anthropomorphoid, and even claim to be Christian. More recent sci-fi – such as Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’, the inspiration for the film Arrival, in which humans try to communicate with heptapods who perceive all time simultaneously – features aliens that are much more alien. The more we learn about ourselves and the universe, the more we appreciate that aliens probably won’t just be humans with longer limbs and waving antennae. How do you communicate with a planet-sized slime with ESP that eats electricity?
The 19th-century approach to breaking the cosmic ice was to attract attention with a huge (preferably exploding) drawing. The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss wanted to plant a visual proof of Pythagoras’ theorem, comprising a right-angled triangle bordered on each side by squares, in the Siberian tundra. The borders of the shapes were to be marked out by trees and their interiors filled with wheat: this would demonstrate to anyone able to view the diagram from space that humans had mastered both mathematics and agriculture. In Austria, Joseph von Littrow proposed digging trenches in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them ablaze. Charles Cros, a poet and inventor, petitioned the French government to fund the construction of a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the Académie des sciences to be awarded to the first person to communicate successfully with aliens, with the proviso that they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well known’. Tristan Bernard satirised the alien-seekers in a story in which humanity, on receiving an unintelligible message from Mars, writes huge messages across the Sahara: ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What are you making signs for then?’ ‘We’re not talking to you, we’re talking to the Saturnians.’
In 1896, the Victorian polymath Francis Galton published a short story in which he describes a message received from Mars – conveyed in a Morse code-like sequence of long and short pulses of light – that begins by illustrating basic mathematical principles, using them as the foundation for progressively more complicated ideas. This encapsulated the scientific community’s best idea of what a message from or to space should look like. Mathematics is the same throughout the universe (they assumed), so using mathematics as the foundation for the message, rather than flaming trenches, seemed a good way of making it universally intelligible. When Guglielmo Marconi started experimenting with radio in the 1890s, transmitting messages like Galton’s to outer space began to look like a realistic possibility. ‘That it is possible to transmit signals to Mars,’ Marconi said, ‘I know as surely as if I had a gun big enough or powder strong enough to shoot there,’ and he endorsed the mathematical style of message outlined in Galton’s story: ‘By sticking to mathematics over a number of years one might come to speech.’ The challenge of communicating with aliens by radio was taken up enthusiastically by Nikola Tesla, who claimed to have intercepted a signal from ‘another world, unknown and remote’. It began with counting: ‘One … two … three …’
I love “with the proviso that they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well known’.” (We discussed the movie Arrival in 2016.)
while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the Académie des sciences to be awarded to the first person to communicate successfully with aliens, with the proviso that they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well known’
The story goes (I’ve read about it a few days ago, possibly on LH) that the award was given to the Apollo 11 crew (I forgot which person in particular), because by the wording of the will the humans who had landed on the moon qualified as aliens.
Wouldn’t Gagarin have been the first alien then, and the Vostok 1 ground station radio crew the most deserving of the prize? Or perhaps these two:
I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!
Exactly what an alien with evil intent would say!
Wouldn’t Gagarin have been the first alien then
IIRC the exact phrasing was something to the effect of “any other celestial body, excepting Mars”. So the Moon qualified but LEO didn’t.
It appears the goal was “to find means of communications with a heavenly body—Mars excluded”.
Shouldn’t the prize have gone to the people in Houston? They were the ones who communicated with another celestial body and got a response – the guys on the moon only SENT the response!
Armstrong and Aldrin presumably communicated with each other while on the moon, too.
“But almost the only thing we know for certain about aliens is that they don’t live close enough to see us pointing.”
If the most interesting thing about us is us (that is our soul or in other words consciousness. “Something we beleive in, something that makes a person different from a stone”) then characters found in fantasy rather than sci-fi become plausible.
Thanks Keith, for giving me a hankerin’ for an 89-cent chuck roast 🙁
That would be about $7 a pound in today’s dollars, Yuval.
The same page has 59¢ chuck roast, too (in bigger letters). I can’t tell what the difference is.
If only the Saturnians would thus transmit to us the secret of Saturnian verse.
Pythagoras’ theorem,
Babylonians already. (From the department of the bleedin’ obvious.)
@AntC: Not that the Pythagorean Theorem is hard to derive, but most (or maybe all) pre-Greek references to a² + b² = c² in right triangles (including the Babylonian tablet in the video) are really about the converse of the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s not clear to what extent earlier geometers recognized that there was even a distinction between the two. The equivalence between them is normally proven (for example, by Euclid) using SSS congruence; however, while SSS is probably more intuitively obvious than the Pythagorean Theorem itself, it is actually more complicated to prove.
Thanks @Brett, for the purposes of this thread, i suspect it’s going to be easier to persuade our hypothetical/hypotenusal Saturnanians with a table of integers — as per the Babylonians. All we need is a broadcast which can’t possibly be radio static.
We don’t need show how we prove Pythagoras’ (variety of) theorem; only that we know about right-angles and therefore geometry yadayada. The chief evidence is the medium, not the message.
Whenever someone alludes to Marshall McLuhan, my mind immediately goes to “Crimes, Misdemeanors, and Payback.”* (That’s got to be a more obscure reference than Die Kinder.)
* That’s a Mad TV sketch title, thus the quotation marks, containing nothing but a fictional movie title in italics. Mad TV was generally pretty bad, like Saturday Night Live but explicitly more juvenile. Apparently it ran for almost twenty years, but even in the early days when it was an actual cultural phenomenon, most of the performances were terrible, except for Phil LaMarr and sometimes Nicole Sullivan (as Mia Farrow in the link).
I didn’t even know that Mad TV was a thing. But that parody got a chuckle out of me.
IIRC the exact phrasing was something to the effect of “any other celestial body, excepting Mars”.
Goguet died in 1891, so her will was written well before either Marconi or Tesla. I suppose she had in mind communication via transportation a la Verne (1865). In that case, sending a manned projectile to the Moon would certainly qualify (there is no mention of recipients), and the Apollo 11 crew was the first to achieve this.
Arguably the work of Dr. Ing. W. Stepp (1943), the first person to unintentionally bounce radar off the moon and detect the echo, should have counted too. The first use of such radar for communication was in 1946, first by a U.S. team, then by a Hungarian team. It finally was superseded in the late 1950s and early 1960s by artificial communications satellites (the Moon being a natural communications satellite).
Nowadays, moon-bounce radio is left to hams, who have achieved it with a transmission power of 3 milliwatts (2009), sent and received by the 25-meter single-dish Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands, which was officially decommissioned in 2000 but is still in use for amateur and small professional projects.
I forgot to mention that after landing, Armstrong pointed out that Verne’s lunar bullet Columbia had the same name as the Apollo 11 command module, and that both were launched from Florida (Verne discusses Texas as an alternative, Hawaii not being available at the time) and landed in the Pacific. Verne’s physics is basically correct, except that he forgot to allow for air resistance and his mechanism for reducing the effects of acceleration on the crew (water-based shock absorbers) wouldn’t work, so he would need an impracticably long cannon barrel to keep the acceleration manageable.
Lastly (the edit timer seems to be broken), the amount given for the Guzman Prize is too large. There were two prizes, this one and one for discovering an effective treatment for heart diseases, both for 50,000 francs. The medicine prize was apparently never awarded.
When the Guzman Prize was initially devised, “franc” had a fairly objective and stable meaning, because gold standard. The subsequent travails of the 20th century, however, led to a collapse in the value of the nominal franc circulating in France, leading to such banana-republic gambits as the “franc nouveau” of 1960, where new replaced old at a ratio of 1:100, meaning one extremely-debased old franc was now one new centime. I don’t know what the Apollo 11 guys actually received, in currency or otherwise.
But that parody got a chuckle out of me.
Me too.
Goguet died in 1891, so her will was written well before either Marconi or Tesla. I suppose she had in mind communication via transportation a la Verne (1865).
…or some kind of interplanetary semaphore. I’m not sure how old is the first science-fictional mention of communicating between planets by way of producing large bright lights; I think I’ve seen it in some pre-1891 work, possibly by Verne…
I’m not sure if the scientific knowledge of 1891 would have ruled out the “just use a really good telescope” option either.