Summary (Aug 21, 2003): Should an interstellar communication be encoded in the language of mathematics, or should we tolerate the ambiguities and nuances of spoken languages which may not share much context?
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Counting on Distant Worlds by Douglas Vakoch, SETI Institute's Director of Interstellar Message Composition
If some day we receive an information-rich signal from another star, no one expects it to be written in English, Chinese, or Swahili. Instead, researchers engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) often suggest that mutual comprehension will come through the language of math.
Imagine for a moment an extraterrestrial civilization that can build radio telescopes and transmitters, and thus signal its existence across interstellar space. Wouldn't such a civilization's knowledge of the physical universe overlap at least in part with our own?
Mathematics, it has been argued, provides a common language for talking about this shared scientific understanding.
As physicist and philosopher Sundar Sarukkai notes "Nature, for scientists, is universal in the sense that the laws of science hold in any region of the universe. Their belief that nature is written in the language of mathematics actually reflects their belief that mathematics is a universal language."
If in fact all extraterrestrials capable of interstellar communication have something like the science we are familiar with, would they describe their science in a form we could understand? Would extraterrestrial intelligence, living on worlds that differ from ours physically, biologically, and culturally, nevertheless share with us a common language of mathematics? Parallel Lines of Development? Surely, many have argued, the ability to build a radio telescope requires a capacity to count and to recognize that 2 + 2 = 4. The Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal started with this assumption to create an interstellar language called Lingua Cosmica - the language of the cosmos, published in 1960. Freudenthal's step-by-step tutorials begin with basic counting, then progress through arithmetic to increasingly complex forms of mathematics.
If extraterrestrial savants can follow our descriptions of long division, shouldn't they be able to follow a refresher course in hyperbolic geometry as well? Or might there be extraterrestrials, in some ways even more technologically advanced than we, who never ventured beyond the three dimensions of Euclid's conceptual world?
Sundar Sarukkai Sarukkai, a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in India, suggests that mathematics on other worlds may differ considerably from ours. He is not convinced by the argument that something as basic as counting will lead to the convergent evolution of mathematics on Earth and on distant planets: "Even if numbers or counting can be a common genesis, who is to say that calculus is a universal, necessary consequence of mathematical thought?"
Sarukkai explains his skepticism: "Let us say we accept that numbers or representations of numbers will occur in extraterrestrials." By his analysis, this assumption gets us only part of the way to a shared understanding of mathematics as a whole.
 | | Will understanding our place in the universe help us recognize our common humanity? |
On Earth, Sarukkai says, math is "a specific human activity which discovers particular structures such as algebra, calculus, topology, group theory, and so on." Though extraterrestrials may be very good with numbers, they might do things with them that humans had never imagined. Similarly, parts of human math may be incomprehensible to extraterrestrials.
Having radio telescopes in common, Sarukkai claims, says more about shared patterns of thinking than about any underlying mathematics or technology: "If we begin with the assumption that the extraterrestrial folks have radio telescopes, then we are making an assumption about processes of their thought more than their language or even their technology. That is, what their having radio telescopes most importantly tells us is that these creatures reason in some particular way." A Number of Meanings In Sarukkai's view, the attempt to identify universal languages reflects humankind's long-standing uneasiness with ambiguity. Typically, ambiguity is seen as an obstacle to understanding the world, as reflected in the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid's view that "there is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words."
As an antidote, scholars have been preoccupied over the centuries with finding languages that have fixed and definite meanings. "The search for 'universal' language or 'pure' language," say Sarukkai, "is part of human history in all civilizations. In part, this reflects an enormous distrust of ambiguity in meaning." Ironically, it is exactly the imprecision of any language that makes it work so well. As Sarukkai notes, "it is semantic ambiguity that allows individuals and societies to develop and flourish!"
 | SETI@home uses the idle time of over three million personal computers to sift through radio data for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Credit: SETI@home |
If we cannot count on the universality of mathematics for interstellar communication, is there any hope of comprehending at least some of the meaning an extraterrestrial is attempting to convey? "Definitely yes," according to Sarukkai. But he doesn't think we will stumble across a pre-existing universal language. Rather, we will need to invent languages for interstellar communication: "We always construct languages based on our needs, our capacities, and our traditions."
"I doubt we will 'find' a language ready for use," says Sarukkai. The key, in his view, is to expect some ambiguity as we attempt to bridge the vast distances that separate humans and extraterrestrials: "In looking for a language for interstellar communication, we should be looking not for one-to-one matching, but for some kind of mapping which allows us to understand `vaguely' rather than with certainty."
Even gaining a vague understanding of the universe as seen by another civilization might help us expand beyond our parochial view of the world. And given the tremendous challenges of interstellar communication, living with ambiguity may be our only choice.
Related Web Pages Search for Life in the Universe: Part I
A Perfect World I: Tyson
Tyson and Planetary Society
Tyson Testimony to Congress on Astrobiology
Edward Weiller: Are We Alone?
Chris Chyba: The Search for Life
Table Talk
SETI Institute
Note: Messages
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