THE CODEBREAKERS

by DAVID KAHN

  By preserving many circumstantial details of the heroic world, the Linear B tablets assist in showing to what extent the Iliad is historical, to what extent poetic imagination has transmuted factual dross to fictional gold. Basically, the tablets confirm what archeology—beginning with Schliemann—had already shown, but they do provide additional details. For example, the tablets have two high titles in common with the epics: “wanax” and “basileus.” In the tablets, “wanax” referred to the supreme king in the palace, and “basileus” to one of the many district governors. The epics often confer the title “basileus” on men who were clearly “wanaktes,” showing a generalization of the term. But subconsciously the poet knows that the inferior title of “basileus” may never be applied to a god, though he may with perfect propriety be called “wanax.” “The existence of the title ‘wanax’ in the Iliad is a plain proof of the continuity of the Greek epic from the Mycenaean period onwards,” wrote Denys Page. Another proof of the historicity of the Iliad lies in the many names in -eus that occur in both the tablets and the epics—but not in later Greece. Dorian names were different, and, since the Mycenaean names survived only because the stories did, they testify to the fact that the Siege of Troy was already the subject of oral poetry within a generation of the destruction of the historical city, Troy VII.

  Before Ventris deciphered Linear B, the oldest known specimen of Greek (and hence of European) writing existed on a vase dating from about 750 B.C.; it reads, “The dancer who performs most gracefully of all shall receive this.” Ventris pushed back the frontiers of the language by some 700 years. He disinterred the earliest form of a language that still lives, 32 centuries later, and one of the earliest known forms of the western branch of the Indo-European languages. This has filled in some details of linguistic and semantic change.

  Similarly, the Linear B tablets help depict life in Bronze Age Greece, and so throw additional light upon these obscure origins of Greek history. As Professor T. B. L. Webster declared, “By seeing the Greeks against this background we can measure more clearly than ever before the achievement of the Greeks in leaping out of this context to become the founders of modern civilization.”

  Yet these results are, in the broadest sense, limited. They provide some minor details for literary appreciation; they permit a slightly greater understanding of a brilliant cultural achievement; they rectify an upside-down picture of the relation between two neighboring areas during a brief and distant moment of time, without much altering the view of the inner life of those areas. It is true that no decipherment can ever have the impact upon man that a new scientific discovery can, although the one may equal the other as a mental accomplishment. But even on its own ground of historical importance, the decipherment of Linear B cannot match that of hieroglyphic or that of cuneiform. They painted whole civilizations in rich detail on large and colorful canvases. Linear B slightly embellished one already known. William H. McNeill, in his recent one-volume world history, relegated the results to a footnote.

  The greatness of the decipherment lies not in its substance but in its method. It shines with a clean Euclidean beauty. In it, man thinks more purely rationally, depending less upon external information and more upon logical manipulation of the data to derive new conclusions, than perhaps anywhere else in the humanities. The foundations of the decipherment utilized almost exclusively the observable interrelationships of the script symbols. The decipherers subjected these relationships to a minute scrutiny and, on the basis of only a few simple hypotheses from philology, extracted a pattern of vowels and consonants and then rewove them into a meaningful whole. The decipherment was sufficient unto itself. Everything discovered in the analysis found its place in the synthesis. From this economy and simplicity the decipherment gains its elegance and its great sense of satisfaction. And when, in the phonetic breakthrough, the decipherer necessarily departed from the givens of the script, he borrowed the very minimum of information from the outside world. He needed no bilingual Rosetta Stone, no dusty chronicles of Persian kings—only the single inescapable fact of where the tablets had been found.

  The decipherment’s pattern, more valuable than the information it produced, gives the work its great vitality—a vitality that has overcome the human mortality of its decipherers. For Ventris, like Alice Kober, had died young. Aged 34, he collided with a truck near Hatfield, England, while driving home late one night. But though all men die, to few is it given even in the full span of human existence to produce some useful work that endures beyond their years and makes them immortal. Michael Ventris and Alice Kober, despite their premature deaths, won that victory. They created the model decipherment.

  * This word, which plays a central role in the decipherment of Semitic languages, will be familiar to Jews from the blessings for bread and wine. It appears in the phrase “elohenu melech ho’olam” (“Our God, King of the Universe”).

  26

  MESSAGES FROM OUTER SPACE

  OF ALL THE PROBLEMS CHALLENGING MAN in the modern realms of space and communication, perhaps the most intriguing is the one that lies at their juncture: how to solve messages from other worlds. The detection of a communication from another planet in another solar system would be one of the greatest events in human history. The discovery that other beings inhabit the same corner of eternity as man, that “they” are out there and “we” are down here, that life is not only an earthly state of being, that man must now surrender his last claim to uniqueness in the universe, would profoundly affect human thought. At the same time, it would open unimaginable vistas of technological growth that might help men solve the problems of war, disease, hunger. This would require an exchange of information, something beyond the mere hearing of a signal from outer space.

  Yet, paradoxically, the very dissimilarities that would make the transfer of knowledge so fruitful might impede it. Could man understand a message from beings whose very modes of consciousness might differ from his? Could he extract information sent by creatures whose experience might seem at first glance to be utterly remote from his, who might not even respond to the same sense stimuli as humans, whose ways of thought might be as different from man’s as man’s are from the ant’s? No doubt men would try, as Ulysses tried,

  To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,

  Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

  But could they do it?

  The problem is not merely academic. Before dawn on the clear, cold morning of April 8, 1960, a young radio astronomer, Dr. Frank D. Drake, and a handful of technicians arrived in the electronics-packed control room nestling beneath the 85-foot radio telescope that stands in a grassy meadow at tiny Green Bank, West Virginia. They aimed its parabolic dish at Tau Ceti, an average-sized nearby star in the constellation of the Whale that was then rising over the eastern rim of the mountainous horizon. They set clockwork to track the star as it moved across the vault of the sky. Drake turned on the loudspeaker that would bring into the control room the radio emanations that the radio telescope—which is basically a giant directional radio antenna—would pick up. He started the recording device whose pen would trace the emanations on a moving strip of paper. At about 6 a.m., he reached the last switch in his long series—the one for the mechanism that would automatically tune the receiver to listen in to one radio frequency after another. With a certain sense of destiny, he flicked it.

  Mankind had begun the first major search that could lead to perhaps the most important discovery in its history—messages from outer space.

  Two years later, in the dimly lit caucus room of the House of Representatives, Emilio Q. Daddario, a Congressman from Connecticut who, like most of his colleagues, is usually concerned with much more down-to-earth problems, put a question that might have seemed to belong, not to the august halls of Congress, but to science fiction, cereal boxes, comic strips, or teenage speculations. “I wonder,” he asked the distinguished British astronomer Dr. Bernard Lovell, “taking into consideration the status of all of
the possibilities of planets including those which might have life of one kind or another, what are the possibilities of receiving signals from other planets, and what kind of program should we have if any, and what would it involve?” Ten years earlier, such a question would have made Daddario the butt of laughter and might even have cost him some votes back home. On March 21, 1962, nobody laughed, and the question got a serious answer: “Well, sir, I think that now one has to be sympathetic about an idea which only a few years ago would have seemed rather farfetched.” And then the Congressmen and the scientists went on to discuss that idea.

  Just a few months earlier, the National Academy of Sciences had sponsored a conference at Green Bank, at which 11 scientists explored in some depth the questions of extraterrestrial life and its detection. And by 1965, some scientists had grown so trigger-happy over the possibility of hearing messages from outer space that three Russian astronomers announced that they had heard radio waves on a 100-day cycle from quasar CTA-102 indicating a supercivilization—only to retract it, after an almost unanimous chorus of skepticism, the very next day.

  Men have long wondered whether other beings exist elsewhere in the universe. Lucretius thought it “in the highest degree unlikely that this earth and sky is the only one to have been created.” A Chinese philosopher, Teng Mu, thought along the same lines, and Plutarch wondered about the habitability of the moon. But for centuries Ptolemaic astronomy, with its earth at the center of its universe, precluded any such thoughts from being any more than idle speculation. Then the Copernican revolution broke through the Ptolemaic spheres, and the Newtonian discovery of the laws of gravitation, which tie together the earth and the most distant stars, proposed to men’s minds the new thought that nature might behave in the same way throughout the universe, that celestial phenomena might follow the same laws as terrestrial.

  Soon thereafter a number of scientists and philosophers expressed the idea that there might be a plurality of worlds. Christiaan Huygens, discoverer of the rings of Saturn, looked up at the starry heavens and wondered, “Why may not every one of these stars or suns have as great a retinue as our sun, of planets, with their moons to wait upon them?” Bishop John Wilkins, author of the first book on cryptology in English, published The Discovery of a World in the Moone, or a Discourse tending to prove that ‘tis probable there may be another Habitable World in the Planet. Poets found these ideas a fertile ground for fancy. Milton wondered in Paradise Lost whether the moon might not have clouds and rain and also fruits and creatures to eat them. He contended that it was disputable whether the entire universe existed only to convey shards of starlight to the earth, but ended by urging Adam and Eve to “Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live, in what state, condition or degree,” but to be happy in Eden. Alexander Pope thought that any knowledge of “what other planets circle other suns” might help man to know himself better. A number of writers of early science fiction discussed the question of life on other planets.

  But for centuries such speculations were sanctioned only by imagination. Mankind’s anthropocentric philosophy and religion even frowned upon them. Science turned up no evidence for the possible existence of other solar systems, and the more it learned about this one, the less hospitable other planets appeared as cradles of life. Mercury was too hot, Jupiter and Saturn and the other outer planets too cold. Venus and Mars, on the other hand, emerged as possibilities. Then, in 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli “discovered” the so-called canals of Mars. Their ruled-line precision seemed best explainable as the work of intelligent beings. Other astronomers, equally respectable, confirmed the canals and reinforced the implication that the red planet could support life by their observation of the darkening of certain areas during Martian springs, as if vegetation were growing. These ideas caught the public fancy, and from these few threads of evidence Sunday supplement writers wove entire tapestries of Martian biology and sociology.

  Interest in the problem periodically rose to a peak whenever Mars approached Earth closely in their orbits, which occurred every 15 to 17 years. Men animatedly discussed whether the Martians might be trying to contact Earth, and a few attempts were actually made to detect any signals. But nothing was heard, and the progress of scientific research soon made it highly improbable that any kind of intelligent life could exist on Mars. It was too cold, and there was too little water. Continued astronomical observations reduced the “canals” to a few faint lines on the Martian surface. As for Venus, its cloud-covered surface seemed to preclude gaining any visual evidence of life there.

  At the same time, science seemed to have decided that life, if it existed at all elsewhere in the universe, was extremely rare. The birth of the solar system apparently required a freak occurrence. In the immeasurable depths of the void—where, if the sun were an apple placed at New York, the nearest star would be another apple at Moscow—two stars approached one another and swung past, each drawing out of the other long filaments of gas that condensed into planets. Anyone who has ever tried to get a golf ball into a stationary hole a few hundred yards away will appreciate the difficulty of intionally getting the two “apples,” both in motion, to hit each other, and much more the chance of their accidentally grazing one another while on random courses. So infrequently would this event have occurred that in the whole history of the universe only the sparsest sprinkling of planetary systems would have come into being. The probability of other life in the universe would consequently be so low as to be negligible.

  Theories were propounded that the solar system might have formed out of a great whirling mass of gas, floating in the universe, that condensed under gravitational attraction into the sun and its satellites. This ran into the problem that the sun’s gravitation would apparently prevent the formation of planets. Though this difficulty still plagues cosmologists, the collision theory began to encounter even greater inconsistencies, such as the presence of an iron core in the earth when the sun, from which the earth was putatively born in the cosmic accident, has so little of that element. As a result, the condensation theory came to be accepted more and more by astrophysicists. Moreover, external evidence tends to support it, such as observations of what appear to be stars forming by condensation elsewhere in the universe.

  The great implication of the condensation theory is that planetary systems must come into existence almost routinely as a by-product of the gaseous contraction and swirling that produce stars, and that a fair proportion of stars must have them. Evidence exists that this is so. Stars with planetary systems rotate much more slowly than those without, because the planets carry much of the system’s spin, or angular momentum. Observation of many stars shows a sharp difference in their rotation speeds—some spinning on their axis in a matter of hours, others, like the sun, taking 25 days for a single revolution. Furthermore, all stars above a certain temperature and mass spin rapidly, while all those below spin slowly. Astronomers know how many stars exist of each of type, and this tells them that the Earth’s galaxy alone, the Milky Way, contains millions of slowly spinning stars. Almost certainly these stars have planets. The pendulum of scientific opinion had begun its swing away from the theory of a scarcity of life in the universe toward one of its prevalence.

  More direct evidence that planets exist elsewhere—though none have yet been seen—has been accumulating since World War II. If sufficiently heavy, a planet orbiting a star will tug sufficiently at its parent star to make it wiggle in its motion across the celestial sphere. This wiggle has been observed in two stars, 61 Cygni and Barnard’s star. Calculations indicate that the satellite of 61 Cygni is about eight times the mass of Jupiter and that it circles its parent body every 4.8 years. That of Barnard’s star revolves in a 24-year orbit and is half again as big as Jupiter.

  It thus began to appear that planetary systems are not unusual but common in the universe. Of course, only those fulfilling certain conditions would be suitable as abodes of life. The main conditions appear to be a parent star
long-lived and stable enough to permit the emergence of life, a planet large enough to retain an oxygen atmosphere, and an orbit that stays within a “habitable zone,” defined basically as a zone in which water remains liquid. But even when, from the number of stars that probably have planets, those that are not suitable for one reason or another to support life are successively eliminated, the quantity of stars in just the Milky Way galaxy is so immense that there still remain hundreds of thousands of potential life-bearing worlds.

  While astronomers were coming to these conclusions, biologists were experimenting to show that the chance of life’s arising on these planets was good. Their work actually began in 1828 when Friedrich Wöhler synthesized an organic compound, urea, found in living creatures, from inorganic elements. The biggest step was Darwin’s, of course, in advancing the theory of evolution that showed a continuous development of life forms, from the simplest to the most complex. There remained the problem of how it all started. Darwin himself thought that a few stray molecules containing the critical elements of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, cooked in the warm seas of the primordial earth, jolted by discharges of electricity, might have prepared a compound “ready to undergo still more complex changes.” Serious testing of this hypothesis did not come until the late 1950s and early 1960s. In perhaps the most famous experiment, Dr. Stanley L. Miller subjected a mixture of water vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen —thought to be, on the basis of spectrographic analysis of the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, main constituents of the Earth’s early atmosphere—to a 60,000-volt spark. He circulated the mixture in a sealed system of flasks and tubes for a week. By the end of the first day it had turned pink, and by the end of the week a deep red. Upon analysis, the mixture proved to have converted its simple compounds into glycine, alanine, lactic acid, acetic acid (vinegar), urea, and formic acid. All are organic compounds of importance in life, particularly glycine and alanine, which, as amino acids, constitute proteins, perhaps the most important biological materials.