(Disclaimer: This is a
hard-science post and not recommended for casual readers of this blog. Very,
very rarely, I remember that I am a bit of scientist myself and I am tempted to
write a blog post on some scientific problem which catches my fancy. This is
one such and although I have tried to keep the jargon as simple as possible,
the topic might be a bit heavy. So if you get bored easily, please feel free to
leave now. On the other hand, if you wouldn’t mind learning a little science, bravely
go on and I guarantee you will be rewarded for your patience)
I was watching the movie Green Lantern recently and one scene in the movie especially piqued my interest, the
scene where the pilot Hal Jordan talks to an alien entity for the first time
and the alien says that they are able to understand each other because their
common universal translator works well. That had me thinking on alien
communication, human communication and communication as such.
When we first evolved from the ape
family into humans, one of the primary advantages for our dominating the rest
of the species was our ability to talk and communicate to each other. Speech
defined us, it gave us the tools to share knowledge, plan hunts successfully
and even helped form social unions. Without speech a man could not assert his
right to a woman (in front of his competitors) or even communicate to her that
he considered her his own. I think the words I love you must have been one of
the first few sentences to evolve in human history. And from there to the
organizing of great civilizations transcending all the other species on the
planet was but just a step forward.
But in all this the fact that the
technology (the organs) involved in this form of communication – the tongue,
the vocal cords and its associated musculature remained practically unchanged
over millennia is a cause for surprise. There has been absolutely no
improvement/no evolution/no refinement in vocal cord technology- unlike what
Moores' Law predicted (you know the doubling of technology for transistor
chips?) . We still have the same transmitting set- our vocal cord muscles and
receiving set – the ear drum (the receiver) and the interpreter – the ear bones
or the ossicles (malleus/incus/stapes)which vibrate and carry the spoken
frequencies of the sound waves to the brain for interpretation/parsing the
contents into separate packets of data. So speech tech evolved millenia ago and
stays the same, despite Apple’s Siri (on i-phones) and Samsungs S-tech (on
Galaxy mobiles).
The other great form of human
communication, the written word was evolved long back in the midst of time,
somewhere in the Sumerian valley (or maybe the Indus valley) according to
different sources. But this technology really kicked off after the guttenberg
press got invented. The ensuing availability of cheap paper based communication
devices (also known as books) lead to rapid sharing of knowledge among us
humans and helped push us up the next step in evolution. And this stayed true
right upto the evolution of e-readers which still depend on the written word
being read by the eyes and processed in the brain. Technology stays the same,
only the delivery vehicle has improved, somewhat like the automobile
technology- from the ford model t to ferrari, a car still has four wheels, a
steering column and runs on the road, despite the internal combustion engine
being experimented with alternatives like fuel cells. But I digress.
To get back to my premise, the
most promising new development in information communication after speech was
development of computers and machine language. The fact that you could compress
large amount so information into data packets and transmit them over long distances (yes the internet, is what I
am talking about) has revolutionized our communication capabilities. We are no
longer constrained by the limitations inherent in the other forms of communication,
we dont need to memorize entire books of text (like the vedic scholars did) or
print huge volumes of encyclopedias (Britannica's) but use compressed data
(thank you winzip) for communicating large bits of knowledge over to wider
audiences. The knowledge society we now have is equitable, anyone with access
to the Internet can get any information – you dont need to know Latin or
Sanskrit or be born in the ruling or priestly class to be able to read certain
things. Even the Vatican archives are on the net. How is that for sharing
knowledge?
But every silver lining has a
small cloud or is it vice versa? I can never remember. Anyway the point is as
we develop and transmit more and more data, we find that the transmission time
is bound to increase with the sheer volume of the traffic and the integrity of
the transmitted data is not strictly preserved. Which means garbled data and
lost tempers. Hence in recent years there have been enquiries into alternative
forms of data transmission beyond the light beam technology we now use in
optical fibres (which is the direct descendant of the reflecting
mirrors/candles an old, old device) which has by now reached the end of it
tether (pardon the bad pun) and attention has now shifted to biological forms
of communication. Specifically at the cellular level. This technology is also
known a bio-mimetics or imitating biology.
Bio-mimetics involves copying
nature to beat technlogical challenges. For example, by studying the hovering
effect of humming birds we were able to get helicopters to hover in mid air.
And by studying the underwater propulsion techniques of certain squids/calamari
we were able to produce harpoons which work well in the depth of the ocean
where the immense pressures will make any gun fired underwater absolutely
useless. And the most commonly quoted example is of course the invention of Velcro
by observing the sharp burrs found in nature. So by adapting the communication
technologies as seen in nature we have progressed a great deal in our own ways
of getting ahead.
For example bacteria communicate
by a process called quorum sensing. When certain chemicals are released by
bacterial cells which form part of a colony, the main body of the colony waits
till a critical mass is built up (a quora is formed) before all of them start
producing the chemical together which helps this colony communicate to other
far off colonies. A direct example of this would be the anti-corruption
crusader Anna Hazare's movement last year. When Anna Hazare and his India
Against Corruption organization first started their hunger strike, everyone had
a wait and watch approach, till the media got into the act and celebrities
started turning up to share the platform with the IAC crowd and suddenly the
anti-corruption movement was the flavor of the month with all the country
talking about it all the time. It had taken a critical mass to build up before the
general public decided that this is an issue worth devoting their time and
attention to.
And that is precisely what
bacterial communication is also all about. Translated into computer tech it
means any high tech signal, which is passed over an unstable line, waits till
the data is completely built up before transmitting itself in one high speed
burst without loss or drop of any crucial data. Can you see the military aspect
involved in secure transmissions with no data loss?
Now when scientists borrowed this
idea from the bacteria, they also went a step further and tried to use
bacterio-phages which are basically predatory viruses which infect bacteria and
force them to make copies of themselves to distribute far and wide. This is a
very useful technology when it comes to communication as it allows you to input
a single copy of data and allow it to multiply itself at almost instantaneous
speeds and then get distributed over a wider network making sure that the data
is never lost in translation. This would solve the problem of all those long
distance data losses seen with transatlantic fiber optic lines if the lines are
coated with bacteria and the data is transmitted in the form of a virus. A
fusion of biology and computers to aim for in the future.
A further example of bio-mimetics
involves the neural network theory of computing where computers are built
mimicking the data transmission seen in neural (nerve) pathways seen inside the
human body (familiar to people who use C-sharp). Our nerves are one of the most
efficient data transmission devices ever built, as they help the various parts
of our body to communicate with the brain at speeds which cannot be matched by
even IBM's latest supercomputers. The basic structure of any nerve is the
neuron, a cell which sits in the middle and send out branching fibers (long
tubes) called axons which communicate with other axons from other neurons. If
you take the analogy further neurons are distributed server networks while
axons are the connecting cables and the central server is of course our brain.
But unlike computers which work
wholly by electricity our nerves (and brain) communicate with a combination of
electro-chemical processes. The data (or nerve impulses) travel electrically
along the axons but when they reach the end of the line where one axon touches
another they are converted into chemical signals called neuro-transmitters
which helps the signal jump over the gap and communicate with other remote and
distant axons too. It’s like a signal which travels over a wire suddenly
becoming a wireless signal when it reaches the end of the line and when it is
picked up by another wire again travels over the wire. Wire-wireless-wire
automatically. Now can you see the resemblance to a wifi-router and see where
the idea originated from?
With all this knowledge in
transmitting communication we still somehow falter when it comes to the basics
of communication. We still cannot communicate with the other species on our
planet. The birds and bees. Or the anthropoid apes. Or the whales and dolphins.
Recent scientific evidence has found out that the high pitched squeaks of dolphins
and the low decibel whale songs do form some rudimentary form of communication,
but how rudimentary or how advanced we are unable to judge as long as we are
unable to decipher it- the same thing which prevents us from deciding whether
the indus valley civilization was aryan or dravidian – we have the data but we
just cant interpret it.
The ant species have been found to
use complex chemical trails to communicate and so have the bees (which use a
variety of pheromones). We know this but we cant understand them. We hear the
bird songs and think that they sing to please us and never try to make more of
an effort to investigate whether they are actually communicating to each other.
We even disregard the communication capabilities of our nearest relatives in
the evolutionary scale – the anthropoid apes who have been found to use a large
variety of sign language to talk to each other. Remember we once passed through
that very same phase of sign language before we developed the spoken language
due to our uniquely sensitive vocal cords.
Unless we make more of an effort
to try and understand the communication technologies of other species on our
own planet, we will be a massive failure when it comes to communicating with
species which might try to contact us from outer space. We will be like ants to
them in communication technology, running around, laying chemical trails. Or
maybe they would have to teach us the basics of their language like how we
train apes to speak in sign language. Given the rudimentary vocabulary of apes
which use sign language, I fear that any interstellar communication between any
advanced species and we humans would leave those aliens clutching their hairs
in sheer frustration at the inability of humans to learn anything.
Already we are reaching out to the
stars, already the Voyager spacecraft is now past the edges of our solar system
and into deep space. And NASA has sent the Kepler deep space telescope after it
to try and analyze any signals we might receive back from space. As for our own
signals, the Voyager spacecraft carry messages recorded in all human languages
– both voice and pictures as humanity's welcome message for any civilization
which happens to pick up our broadcast. And also samples from earths music,
which is a very sound concept as unlike language, sound waves are essentially
on the same scales throughout the universe, as expressed by the
vibration/frequency of all bodies in the universe. From the smallest asteroids
to the largest pulsars all of them oscillate and produce sound waves of one
kind or another in different frequencies. So any advanced civilization should
be able to pick up, interpret and respond in kind to any sound wave we produce.
This might even be in the form of the definite frequency of their planetary
body or the frequency of a large enough nearby pulsar, challenging us to
identify their location in deep space by analyzing the sound waves- a sorta location
search in a galactic Google map by pinpointing the nearest cell phone tower to
where they are currently.
And finally we come to mathematics
which all those science fiction movies have conditioned us to think of as the
de-facto lingua franca of the universe. Would we be able to converse with other
alien species through mathematical constants? I dont know myself although my
vote goes for the laws of physics rather than Pythagoras theorem as the
universal constant.
But first we have to learn to talk
to the apes. And the ants and the bees. And the dolphins and the whales. If we
are to ever have any chance of talking to any other intelligence species from
anywhere else in the universe. Or we should hope they bring us a universal
translator like the one shown in the movie, the green lantern. And forever
remain the stupid cousins of the universe. The choice is ours right now, for
the sake of all humanity to decide our place in the universe. Learn and Grow
Strong. Go forth or Stagnate. I hope we make the right choice.
(P.S. I welcome questions and
discussions on all the points I have raised here – as long as they are serious
and not frivolous)
No comments:
Post a Comment