The search for E.T. has lessons for us all | 寻找外星人的努力对我们所有人都有启发 - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT英语电台

The search for E.T. has lessons for us all
寻找外星人的努力对我们所有人都有启发

The US government’s pursuit of alien life has unforeseen benefits for those back on Earth
美国政府对外星生命的追求给地球上的人们带来了意想不到的好处。
00:00

Earlier this year, I found myself in the Pentagon, the vast headquarters of the American military apparatus, for a meeting, when I spotted a striking sign on a door. It seemed to indicate the office was dedicated to research into unidentified flying objects, aka UFOs. Security was tight, and yet I asked, “Is that a joke?”

I did not get a clear response. But in late June, the Pentagon released a widely discussed report revealing that officials have been studying sightings of UFOs – or, as they now prefer to call them, UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena) – for many years.

Of 144 UAP sightings between 2004 and 2021, only one can be easily blamed on a normal object (in that case, a deflated balloon). “[We] currently lack sufficient information in our dataset to attribute incidents to specific explanations,” the report concluded. Speculation about top-secret Russian, Chinese or even American technology, not to mention the wilder theories about aliens, has run rampant ever since.

But amid all the chatter about extraterrestrials, there is another intriguing question that the US government has been quietly studying: if aliens did show up, how might we communicate with them?

The US government’s efforts to look for, and potentially communicate with, aliens are well known to sci-fi devotees. Seti, short for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence”, employs one hundred scientists from its base in Mountain View, California, part of Silicon Valley. (Where else?)

What is less well known, however, is that Seti is also working with archaeologists, anthropologists and other social scientists on the assumption that should we find somebody, we might want to say hello. Much of this is secretive, but back in 2014 Nasa published an extensive report on this work, titled “Archeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication”.

undefined

Though it attracted little mainstream attention at the time, it makes for fascinating reading (and can be found online). “To move beyond the mere detection of such intelligence, and to have any realistic chance of comprehending it, we can gain much from the lessons learned by researchers facing similar challenges on Earth,” explained a foreword by Douglas Vakoch, a clinical psychology professor emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies who was then “director of interstellar message composition” at Seti.

“Like archaeologists who reconstruct temporally distant civilisations from fragmentary evidence, Seti researchers will be expected to reconstruct distant civilisations separated from us by vast expanses of space as well as time,” he noted.

“And like anthropologists, who attempt to understand other cultures despite differences in language and social customs, as we attempt to decode and interpret extraterrestrial messages, we will be required to comprehend the mindset of a species that is radically Other.”

In practical terms, this meant that the Seti team had analysed how archaeologists failed to interpret Mayan and Egyptian texts to see how to decode unfamiliar signals. They had pondered how “dead” ancient Greek culture transmitted signals into modern European thought and looked at how the anthropologist Ruth Benedict tried to “decode” Japanese culture for the US government during the second world war.

The research also explored the mistakes that physical anthropologists and archaeologists made when they first encountered Neanderthal fossils, most notably by presuming that this branch of humanity walked in a stooped fashion since the first excavation of bones indicated this. (It turned out those bones were from an individual with arthritis.)

All of which led the Seti researchers to conclude that if they are going to communicate with aliens, they cannot use auditory signals since “the factors affecting the propagation of sounds could vary so much from planet to planet”, noted cognitive scientist William Edmondson. Nor, he added, can they use symbols since “symbolic communication – in which the connection between sign and signified is arbitrary – is intrinsically limited”.

Instead, the group favours sending pictures of Earth into outer space or using maths-based quantitative signals, since these seem to be less dependent on any symbolic interpretation. But while prime numbers are presumed to be a universal construct, Vakoch has stressed that it would be dangerous to assume that numbers are perceived in a universal manner.

None of this, of course, casts any light on UAPs, which might perfectly well turn out to be any number of unexciting phenomena. Nor does it address the potential downsides of making contact, as described by physicist Stephen Hawking – and many great novelists, who fear that alien beings would not only be technologically superior, but also likely to wipe out humans.

Futile or not, I find it oddly cheering that at least part of the government has been devoted to thinking about the near-unthinkable in recent years and doing so with an admirably interdisciplinary approach.

And even if we never find any extraterrestrial life, the search for it helps to foster a debate about what it is that enables humans to communicate with other “alien” humans, across time and space on our own planet. Right now, that is badly needed – with or without any UFOs.

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

Lex专栏:亚洲将遭遇“特朗普交易”的冲击

汽车行业保护主义抬头的定价过程才刚刚开始。

马斯克对特朗普的押注得到了回报

特斯拉和X的首席执行官将成为特朗普总统身边最具影响力的政治和商业顾问之一。

巴尼耶削减养老金的计划触动了法国人的神经

法国总理的这一省钱提案遭到反对,尽管人们呼吁加强代际公平。

英国学费上涨对学生和大学财务状况的影响

专家称,这些措施不足以解决高等教育经费问题或吸引来自贫困家庭的学生。

这次美国大选对美国企业意味着什么?

大选结果将对能源、汽车和制药等领域的企业产生重大影响。

德国的商业模式失败了吗?

德国三大主要产业同时陷入低迷,经济也停滞不前。政客们终于清醒过来了吗?
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×