A language invented by a mathematician in the 1960s for communicating with aliens
If you were to try to communicate with alien life forms, what would you say? And, just as importantly, what would you say? This question has inspired countless science fiction novels and sparked real debate among scientists involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
Now, a digital artist and academic has come up with his own answer, writing a series of puzzling poems in , an artificial language designed for alien communication.
Richard Carter, senior lecturer in digital media at the University of Roehampton and author of the new collection Signals, has always been interested in code languages and various modes of digital communication. So when he encountered Lincos, a "cosmic language" invented by mathematician Hans Freudenthal in 1960, he was intrigued by its potential as an artistic medium and cosmic conversation starter. Possibilities created interest.
"I thought it was interesting because Freudenthal's project was a very unusual idea," Carter said by phone. "It's not just the concept of communicating with aliens, it's about math, science, atoms and the usual standard indicators that you might expect to find a common basis for communication."
"Freudenthal's work contains elements of this, but he Not really interested in that,” he continued. “He was interested in communicating memory, morality, competition, all these elements about the nature of human life in the world, at least in his mind, using mathematics and logic to do that,” which led to “ways of communicating and interacting with others and outsiders. A fascinating contrast between disparate attempts at interstellar communication.”
Freudenthal envisions Lincos as a spoken language composed of radio signals of different wavelengths that are transliterated into text. The concept was later adapted into written glyphs by Canadian astrophysicists Yvan Dutil and Stéphane Dumas, who used the language in 1999 and 2003 to transmit so-called "cosmic call" messages to nearby star systems .
Carter draws on the rich history of Lincos in Signals, a title that deals with both the artificial signals sent by humans to make contact with aliens, and the natural signals sent to us by the universe in the form of observable cosmic phenomena like stars. Signals, planets and galaxies.
"We are trying to send information for various purposes, but there are actually all kinds of information being sent to us and we are developing tools to try to receive them," Carter said. "While these are not what we might think of as intelligent information, they may still be key indicators that there is indeed something out there that maybe, just maybe, somehow, against all odds, we will be able to communicate with."
These are mutual Relevant poetry, written based on the Dutil-Dumas glyph, touches on fundamental human themes such as distance, social connection, war, and our experience of the physical universe. The book also weaves in otherworldly descriptions of the stars examined by NASA's Kepler telescope, which discovered thousands of exoplanets during its lifetime. NASA Scientist Geert Barentsen translates stellar light curves, a measure of a star's brightness over time, into what Carter calls "an evocative, grainy, pixelated glimpse of these distant ancient stars." "I really wanted to combine these poems with these selected images to once again emphasize the exchange of signals across the universe - the closest thing we have to interstellar travel at the moment," Carter said.
"This kind of writing is something that's done in a certain way." This kind of work stems from a broader tradition of experimental writing and poetry," he notes. "Sometimes my work is described as belonging to the tradition of visual poetry, where there is language, but writers are interested in the material and sometimes they are not even immediately readable as poetry. Only when you think about them more deeply conceptually , you understand that they are built on the rhythms and patterns of language."
In this way, Signals can alternately be seen as puzzles, artworks, or real icebreakers for interstellar chat.As for whether he sees aliens as an ideal audience, Carter said it's ironic that he's pessimistic about the possibility of humans establishing contact with alien species, but added that our urge to seek out aliens is inherently Very valuable. At the very least, our invocations of these hypothetical beings can help us assess our fragile and beautiful place in the universe.
"In the back of his mind, I did wonder if [Freudenthal] actually imagined [Lincos] being used, or if this was more of an intellectual exercise for the human audience, which in many ways, a lot of the alien messages did ," Carter said. "They are not for them, out there. They are for us. They are our attempt to express ourselves to the wider universe, because the chances of us sending our message out and having it received and understood are so low that they are almost meaningless."
"It's an attempt to communicate with aliens, but in some ways, when we think about our contemporary situation - trying to manage a changing world and negotiate all the things it creates - a lot of it Part of it is trying to understand those signals that the Earth is communicating with us in order to be able to understand what they mean and respond meaningfully to that, reading the scriptures of the Earth and the atmosphere that might lead us to a better future," he concluded.
