Why Are We So Terrible At Contacting Aliens? by John Wenz, The Awl (18 October 2013) ssg: Every time n election rolls around i wonder why we are so terrible at communication with aliens. Philadelphia, PA, USA. In Stanislaw Lems 1968 novel His Masters Voice, a message bubbles up from an underground fringe community that comes to be regarded as a message from an alien civilization. A group of scientists are secretly assembled by the United States government to crack the message. For the most part, they fail. They run through some math, come up with a genome, use it to pop out a useless goop that can sort of kind of teleport things with absolutely no precision, and continue to search for meaning in the message. They fail. The book served as a sort of treatise on the problem of communication with an extraterrestrial society. Such communication would be next to impossible, Lem thought. He always wrote a cynical view of sci-fi — especially where aliens were involved. His thrice-film-adapted novel, Solaris, involved attempts to communicate with an intelligent lifeform on a distant planet … until the realization is made that the planet itself is the intelligence, the ocean on the planet a super-organism. That ocean is not unlike the LUCA superorganism theory; thats an acronym for a theoretical Last Universal Common Ancestor among current life back at the unicellular level — which, according to those backing the superorganism theory, was a big sea of goop that swapped genes to survive. To Lem, the attempts to contact aliens were a lesson in futility because we cant actually think like those were contacting. We have a variety of intelligent species contemporary to human beings with whom we cannot begin to communicate. Also: sometimes members of our own species. Click on the article title below to read the complete text at The Awl. #news #science #scienceeveryday #sciencesunday #technology #aliens #carlsagan #communication #cultural #encoding #extraterrestrials #firstcontact #intelligence #language #linguistics #literacy #mathematics #messaging #physics #radioastronomy #semiotics #seti #socialnetworking #speciation #wormhole #opinion #sharongaughan
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 23:39:23 +0000