5 http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Electroreception
6 The electrical capabilities of some marine life go beyond sensing to communication, navigation, and even stunning of prey. See: http://www.answers.com/topic/electric-organ-biology
7 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070927-magnetic-birds.html
8 http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/PDF%20files/1.11.pdf
9 http://webscript.princeton.edu/~icouzin/website/pheromone-trail-networks-in-ants/
10 As one example among many, consider American Sign Language. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asl
11 As do, for example, the enhanced dolphins in David Brin’s Uplift universe
12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
13 Most of us aren’t even quite bilaterally symmetric—we’re left or right-handed. And so English offers us gauche (from the French word for left), as a synonym for tasteless and vulgar, and sinister (from the Latin word for left) as a synonym for threatening and creepy.
14 Originally serialized in Analog, September through December 2003.
15 With my left/right, front/back relationship to the world, it’s natural for me to locate an item as (for example) “three meters in front of me and four meters to my right.” A Krul (ignoring its use of meters and degrees as units of measure) might say in that circumstance that the item is “five meters distant from me and in a direction thirty degrees east from my bearing to the North Pole.”
16 Or less extreme than an intelligent hive, the Tines: intelligent packs of doglike creatures in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep.
17 “Who would fardels bear?” Hamlet asks in his famous soliloquy. A fardel, it turns out, is a Middle English term for a burden.
18 Even subatomic particles can have nicknames. The long hypothesized (and as of this writing, still undetected) Higgs boson—the particle that, in theory, provides matter with the attribute of mass—is sometimes referred to as the “God particle.”
19 Is “out of vogue” yet out of vogue?
20 As a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon would have it, “Verbing weirds language.”
21 Dynamite can even be an adjective, as in “That was a dynamite party last night.”
22 Local vernacular being variable, too, as Goths, Huns, Franks, and other ethnic groups shifted about Europe.
23 As much as I enjoy hamburgers, I don’t recommend this course of culinary action.
24 My college German instructor, a grad student from Germany, taught that the Nazis purged many French and English technical terms. I find similar anecdotes on the Web, but nothing definitive—perhaps because I retained too little from that long-ago class to read articles in German.
Google Language Tools offers the following German translations for English telephone: Telephon, Telefon, Fernsprecher, Apparat, Telephonapparat, Telefonapparat, and Fernsprechapparat. Germans didn’t simply adopt the (classically derived) term from the inventor’s English.
25 The French government has long taken an interest in language purity. The L’Académie française (http://www.academie-francaise.fr/) was established in 1635 as the official arbiter of the French language. Enforcement of language standards is very real, as General Electric learned to its dismay in 2006 (http://www.abanet.org/labor/newsletter/intl/2006/Apr/france3.html). So note: L’Académie française prefers that you order viande hachée in lieu of that proverbial hamburger.
26 Or do we? In the not-so-distant future, we might learn to gengineer gills or new senses, enhance our natural senses with implanted prostheses, or upload our minds into (among the possibilities) a virtual reality, robotic shell, or cloned body. For a few of the possibilities, see Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs by Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre.
This being an essay, not a book, let’s set aside new-mode humans for now.
27 And a Very Hard Problem. How self-absorbed are humans to use the Turing test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test) as the criterion for when artificial intelligence has been achieved? The test: If a human can’t tell from a typed dialogue that he’s dealing with a program, that program will be deemed intelligent. By the mirror standard, a competent program might judge humans unintelligent.
Looking at human speech (or the purportedly meaningful contents of tweets and IMs), a case could be made the software was right.
28 Have you kept track of the metaphors that keep intruding? Pondered whether they’re apt to translate?
29 AI—at the level of an entity with which we can interact as though with a human—continues to elude us. What passes for AI, such as chess-playing programs and expert systems—remains too disconnected from the physical world to exhibit a human’s “common sense” (and so, continues to fail the Turing test). Consider how different a program’s environment and experience are from your own. That difference alone may explain humanity’s limited success with developing artificial intelligences.
By comparison to an AI, biological entities native to even a very nonterrestrial world may have an easy time establishing a common ground with us. Such as already having the concept of ground...
30 Some readers—and some authors—won’t sign that contract. See the November 2009 Analog editorial “Aiming High—or Low.”
31 Try explaining that idiom to a Krul.
32 Hard SF: stories based on hard (i.e., real) science—not stories that are difficult to read. Hard SF (including most Analog stories) avoids contradicting what we (think we) understand about the way the Universe works. Not that Analog is a trope-free zone....
33 A language designed to be neutral (among political and ethnic groups) and easy to learn. Despite its laudable goals, few people (and no countries) have adopted it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
34 Or we had a global language and lost it, if you take literally the Tower of Babel story.
35 If George Bernard Shaw is to be believed, even a shared language has its limits. To wit: “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.”
36 That doesn’t appear to be the case in my head. I concede that’s a statistically insignificant sample.
37 Consider the range of possible data formats. If analog: modulated onto the strength/weakness or prevalence/scarcity of what underlying medium? If digital: using what symbol set, and with what type of error-correcting coding? If neural, which chemical(s) are operative? Is information localized, as in familiar digital storage, or distributed, as in holograms and our own neural wiring? That’s only a small sample of the variability we might encounter among independently evolved biospheres. And you thought HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray was a hard problem...
38This expression is hereby offered as a replacement for “by hook or by crook.” Reasonable terms available.
39 The bigger-than-worlds artifact that is the Ringworld is constructed from a substance so strong and dense that it blocks a substantial fraction of solar neutrinos. That’s amazing stuff, without any human equivalent. And so, throughout Larry Niven’s Ringworld series, that material goes by the natives’ term: scrith.
40 Think of, in the Star Wars universe, Yoda and Jar Jar Binks. Better yet, don’t think of them. Annoying, they are. Strong, the aggravation becomes. Weirdness, an inferior substitute for alien is.
On the fantasy side of speculative fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien used archaic wordings to great effect throughout his works to give Middle Earth a terrifically other feel.
41 Such as spoken/sung by the Mother-Thing alien in Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel.
42 An archeological artifact discovered in Rosetta, Egypt, in 1799. Identical passages inscribed in Egyptian and Greek symbols gave valuable clues to reading hieroglyphics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_stone
43 Newton and Leibniz developed quite different representations for differential calculus. Schrödinger’s equation and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics are very different representations of quantum mechanics. And on, and on...
44 I’m hardl
y the first SF writer to wonder how distant species might establish communications. Nor am I the first to suggest that the universality of physical laws would provide common ground. H. Beam Piper’s “Omnilingual” did the latter way back in 1957—in Analog’s precursor, Astounding. The story involves astronauts finding the ruins of an extinct Martian civilization and one explorer recognizing a periodic table—and seeing its value in cracking open the Martian library.
45 My story “Dangling Conversations” (Analog, November 2000) opens with a SETI discovery and goes on to delve deeply into interstellar message coding issues. Expanded and combined with (also expanded) related stories from Analog and elsewhere, “Dangling Conversations” provided the opening segment of my novel InterstellarNet: Origins. As the term InterstellarNet suggests, the communications get much more sophisticated over time.
46 Military and intelligence transmissions are encrypted for security reasons. Premium television channels distributed via satellite are encrypted for commercial reasons.
47 The Krulirim discovered Earth in this way. And encountered, amid all that chatter... Sesame Street. Say what you will about Big Bird, his show might be educational for aliens too.
48 “Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang, revolves around a linguist mastering the newly arrived aliens’ (very alien) language, and the worldview implicit in it. She succeeds only when a physicist in the contact team recognizes an alternative perspective to how human physicists usually formulate physical laws. The linguistics/physics conundrums are laid out for the reader in a very striking story.
49 As in Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle. In the novel, far more than in the movie, the ape/human reversal is blatantly allegorical. Major worldview or language differences would only have obscured the point.
Copyright © 2010 Edward M. Lerner
PROBABILITY ZERO
PROBABILITY ZERO
Timeshare
by Robert H. Prestridge
Joe Johnson fidgeted in his chair. Behind a large teak desk sat Ray Snark, a timeshare salesman. “You know,” Snark said, “there’s a proverb that pretty much sums up your problem and our philosophy here at T-More Resorts.” Johnson raised an eyebrow. “When offered only two choices, take the third.”...
Top of PROBABILITY ZERO
SCIENCE FACT POETRY
PROBABILITY ZERO
Timeshare
by Robert H. Prestridge
Joe Johnson fidgeted in his chair. Behind a large teak desk sat Ray Snark, a timeshare salesman.
“You know,” Snark said, “there’s a proverb that pretty much sums up your problem and our philosophy here at T-More Resorts.”
Johnson raised an eyebrow.
“When offered only two choices, take the third.” Snark paused. “We are that third choice, Joe. Mind if I call you Joe?”
Johnson sighed. “I don’t care what you call me, Mr. Snark—”
“Call me Ray. All of my friends call me Ray—”
“I only care about getting my life back,” Johnson said.
Snark smiled. “And that’s what we’re here to do for you, Joe.”
The salesman slapped a plastic sheet down onto his desk. Animated holograms of tropical islands, mountainous Shangri La-like retreats, and other ersatz paradises hovered above the sheet.
“As I said, we’ve engineered utopias for people like you,” Snark said. “This first plan, our most basic, is Elysian Fields. Here, for one month out of each year for the remainder of your life, you’ll live in perfect bliss. Imagine lying on a beach and feeling your troubles and cares washed away forever. Elysian Fields is like that, and we guarantee it or your money back. Now this next plan—”
“Stop.”
“But—”
“I don’t need anything longer than a month, Ray. I’ll take Elysian Fields.”
The salesman looked bemused. “Keep in mind that you’re not only legally obligated to pay dues, you’re also legally obligated to go each year, voluntarily or involuntarily because—”
“I don’t care.”
Johnson placed his index finger onto a purchase-and-contract pad, sealing the deal before Snark could say anything else.
The salesman stood.
“The shuttle will be here in three minutes,” he said. He offered his hand to Johnson, who shook it. “Congratulations, Joe. I’m sure that Elysian Fields will be more than you’d ever expect.”
A little more than a month later, Johnson appeared in Snark’s office.
“If you don’t mind my saying, Joe, you look one-thousand percent better.”
“I feel ten-thousand percent better.”
Snark smiled, his face positively beaming.
“Excellent!” the salesman said. His smile disappeared. “Something’s bothering you. Didn’t Elysian Fields meet your expectations?”
Johnson sat down in a chair.
“It more than exceeded them,” Johnson said. “Infinitely more so. The food was like... like—”
“Ambrosia? “
“Exactly. And the masseuses—”
“Like golden-haired goddesses from the very temples of Aphrodite—”
“Just like your ads said.” Johnson frowned. “I got rest, I got perspective, I got everything.”
Snark placed a finger to his lips. “So what’s the problem, then?”
“The problem is that I’m afraid of what it would be like to be permanently happy. One part of me wants to be able to experience unhappiness. If I keep going to Elysian Fields, I might become permanently happy.”
Snark nodded his head in seeming appreciation.
“I know that I don’t want to go back to my old life,” Johnson said. “Ever. But I know I can’t go back to Elysian Fields, either.”
“Uh-huh,” replied the salesman.
There was a long silence.
“I want out of the contract, Ray.”
Snark shook his head. “No can do, Joe.”
“But I read the contract. It says—”
“It says you get out if you weren’t satisfied with your plan, not its results. You yourself said that Elysian Fields satisfied you, Joe. In fact, it more than satisfied you.” The salesman held up a hand, stopping Johnson from interjecting. “The room has recorded everything. Legally, we have your clichéd you-know-whats in our palm.”
“So you’re not going to let me out of the contract?” Johnson felt his gut ache.
Snark opened a desk drawer. “No, but we are going to offer you an alternative.”
The salesman slapped a plastic sheet down onto his desk. Animated holograms of war-ravaged worlds, floods, and other desolations hovered above the sheet.
“Now, as you see here, we have several plans.” The salesman pointed. “The first offers mild, free-floating anxiety and some depression. The last, well, let’s just say that those who enter here have pretty much given up all hope. Now for you, I don’t think that either is appropriate. Let’s consider this one, where, among other things, you’ll suffer general malaise, a toothache or two, and several painstaking audits by the IRS...”
Copyright © 2010 Robert H. Prestridge
The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.
—James Baldwin
POETRY
POETRY
Darwinfish
The swamp’s air-breathing daughter climbed up to solid ground.Her legs were short and stubby, but they let her get around.She could have slithered homeward when the rain returned in fall.She said:...
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PROBABILITY ZERO READER’S DEPARTMENTS
POETRY
Darwinfish
The swamp’s air-breathing daughter climbed up to solid ground.
Her legs were short and stubby, but they let her get around.
She could have slithered homeward when the rain returned in fall.
She said: “I’ll check this new world out”— She’s mother to us all.
The swamp’s air-breathing daughter crawled
off in search of food,
But first she had to catch it, and then it must be chewed.
The winged, wiggling creatures so often got away,
Some bugs and plants just made her ill, but we’re alive today.
The swamp’s air-breathing daughter had skin that felt the sky:
The wind that scorched or chilled her and always left her dry.
She sought out shade and coolness to keep the moisture in,
And lived—although, like some of us, she wished for thicker skin.
The swamp’s air-breathing daughter laid eggs that needed wet:
A shell around a zygote must wait for eons yet.
Reluctant to the swamp she crawled when breeding time arrived.
She laid her eggs and swam away, and somehow we survived.
The swamp’s air-breathing daughter left remnants of her shape
In lizard, bird, and mammal from tree shrew to great ape.
Though some who share her DNA deny the past therein,
The evidence won’t go away that we are all her kin.
—Kate Gladstone
Copyright © 2010 Kate Gladstone
READER’S DEPARTMENTS
READER’S DEPARTMENTS
EDITORIAL
Stanley Schmidt
ADJECTIVES THAT AREN’T A long-time favorite topic for heated discussion among linguists and anthropologists is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says, in essence, that language shapes culture. Or, to put it another way, how people think about the world depends on the linguistic tools—words,...
BIOLOG
Richard A. Lovett
BRAD AIKEN Brad Aiken came to Analog by way of sci-fi. Low-grade television sci-fi, to be specific. “Lost in Space was my first thing,” he says. “It was a terrible show, but at the time it was all there was.” Thanks to a brother who was an avid science fiction reader, he was also exposed at a young...
THE ALTERNATE VIEW
John G. Cramer
LEINSTER’S GOLDEN AGE “LOGIC” The Golden Age of Science Fiction began roughly in July 1939, when an issue of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding featured the first published stories of A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov. It ended in about 1957, when a devious Wall Street speculator purchased a majority...
Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11 Page 19
