I hope you enjoyed Part 1 of "Life As We Don't Know It." When we last met we were discussing the film Contact. Now in Part 2 we will continue on this course and then get ready for our next film, Independence Day.
Life As We Don't Know It (Part 2)
THE TOWER OF BABEL
So the people of Earth received this message from Vega. But how could they understand it? The aliens, after all, would speak a different language. This is never a problem in most science fiction, such as in Star Trek, where all beings in the universe speak English. (It is, after all, the international language, so why not the galactic one?)
In Contact the aliens don't speak English. (Perhaps a sign that they are not as advanced as they would like us to believe?) Instead, they send us a message written in their language along with a primer, or key, telling us how to read it. But without using a human language, how does the primer work?
As it turns out, there is a language that will be shared by all intelligent life in the universe. That is the language of science and mathematics. The location of the primer was very cleverly explained in the film, but the way it was used to decode the message wasn't explained very well. Only a glimpse of the coding was shown. So to take an example from the Contact novel, the primer works like this:
To start teaching vocabulary, the aliens set up a few questions and answer them for us. Take these examples:
1A1B2Z
1A2B3Z
1A7B8Z
1A2B4Y
So what does it mean? Well, the letters and numbers aren't really like ours. This is just for illustration. The letters would be symbols from their own language. The numbers could be represented by dots as they were in the little snippet that was shown in the film. But using this form for our example, we would translate it this way:
What do you notice about the first question, 1A1B2Z? You have 1 twice followed by 2 once. It looks like a math problem, right? It is. 1+1=2. That's easy enough, and we've already learned two words. But what does the Z stand for? Since one plus one does in fact equal two, we can assume it means 'true.'
Now look at the last question, 1A2B4Y. We already know that A means 'plus,' B means 'equals,' and Z means 'true.' Does 1+2=4? No. So Y means 'false.' We've
