“And probably there were others being investigated we weren't told about. So maybe—oh, half a dozen objects felt themselves under investigation, and no doubt communicated that. To each other, and maybe to their handlers.”
“Maybe we crossed some sort of threshold—now the order has gone out that all devices are to self-destruct. Except that duds can't.”
“Sounds as reasonable as anything. Tell it to Z.”
“Of course, this means the wild-eyed scientific dissidents were right,” Linda said. “The devices can blow themselves up all by themselves. No antimatter needed.”
They pulled up behind Braun and his partner at the gate to Nellis. Braun must have said something, because they were waved through right after him.
* * * *
Chad woke up, momentarily disoriented. He was still not used to the VIP quarters at the base—and still bemused he was thought important enough to deserve them. He was getting antsy, too. Even though he'd finagled a “liaison for new energy technologies” position, he felt out of the loop in his company ... not where you want to be when your product looks as though it's going to get utterly blindsided by new technology.
And while he felt like a fifth wheel, Linda was in her element. Although hard facts were still few, it wasn't difficult to fill interviews with the seething rumors about the antimatter converter—a QM device that could “resonate” matter into antimatter.
He clicked on the webster, to the non-public news site they'd found just by surfing. Apparently no one had thought to turn it off even though the room's occupants presumably weren't authorized. Chad and Linda hadn't mentioned it; Linda had been careful not to let slip information she could have gotten only from it, but she certainly used it to guide her questioning.
Chad idly clicked on the “latest alerts” banner. He came bolt awake as he read it. “SpaceGuard indicates (greater than)1000 objects on Earth-intersecting trajectories.” That “greater” sign was a shocker: it indicated that the actual number overflowed the capabilities of the system. Quickly, he paged down and read the alert, couched in a telegraphic style nearly two centuries old. Within the orbit of the Moon ... moving at speeds of (greater than)20 klicks a second ... all objects small, roughly 10 meters ... estimated arrival time(s) 2 hours ... azimuthal distribution 360 degrees ... inclination distribution (plus-minus)90 degrees...
“Linda, look at this!”
“Hmmm?” She stretched sleepily.
“Swarms of objects are coming into the Earth out of space. From all directions!”
As his words penetrated, Linda woke up as though stung. She sat up, her hair flying in all directions, to read the alert he'd just seen. She was just leaping out of bed when her phone rang. She turned on the speaker so Chad could hear.
It was Zemani. “Earth is being attacked.” He said it baldly and matter-of-factly. “Ms. McPherson, I'm sure you'll want to come down to the Global Overview Room. You may come too, Mr. Gutierrez. Braun will escort you. Zemani out.”
Linda and Chad looked at each other. Then came the knock on the door. Chad checked; sure enough, it was Braun. “Just a sec,” Chad said. “We'll be out in a moment.”
Chad could have appreciated the Global Overview Room more under different circumstances. In the center an exquisitely detailed hologram of the entire Earth seemed to float in a dark void. Banks of VR consoles, with elaborate heads-up interfaces, surrounded the central display. They could be focused in on any part of the Earth or nearby space to give expanded views for detailed examination. Or for targeting. In fact, electronic overlays of all sorts of information could be made on the Earth and its surrounding space: cities, weather patterns, aurorae ... and extraterrestrial objects.
That last was the focus now. Near-Earth space was illuminated with white sparks, a malevolent fuzz enveloping the planet like an attacking insect swarm. Chad could see the sparks moving, on looking closely. They were all incoming.
“General, what can we do about an attack from space?” he asked.
“Not a lot, unfortunately,” Zemani said. “SpaceGuard is designed for at most a handful of incoming rocks on ballistic trajectories. Obviously we'll use it, but it's a drop in the bucket.”
Even as he spoke, some small white puffs blossomed among the sparks. They dissipated without leaving any obvious gaps in the swarm, like a hand waved through a cloud of mosquitoes.
“We also have kinetic energy ballistic missile defense platforms in low-Earth orbit which we're trying to retarget. Basically, they're shotguns—they throw out a bunch of pellets and let the target run into them. Unfortunately, they're intended for blocking Earth-based ballistic missiles. These objects are not only coming from above rather than below, they're coming in a good five times faster.”
Linda had had her recorders running and was taking notes furiously. “How soon will we know whether they worked, General?”
Zemani looked at something on the display. “In about thirty seconds, when the incomings get to the level of low-Earth orbit.” He expanded the view on the console where he was standing. They watched some of the incoming sparks dodge incredibly as they passed through the ABM defenses. Evidently they were not just on ballistic trajectories, but had staggering propulsive capabilities that must have corresponded to hundreds of g's of acceleration.
A few sparks flared and died, evidently taken out by the defenses. But most just came on through.
Zemani sighed. “Well, we got a few, but nowhere near enough. Now we just have to hope. And pray.”
“General,” someone said. “There's an object incoming, targeted for us, within measurement error. Impact in roughly ... fifteen seconds.”
Chad cringed. He knew it was silly—if it was going to detonate he'd never know—but ancient instincts ruled.
“Five, four, three, two, one ... now!"
Nothing happened.
Chad gleefully noted that everyone else had cringed, too. “It was a dud. Anotherdud,” somebody observed, in relieved tones.
“Damage report?” Zemani snapped.
“Yes, general.” One of the duty officers was clicking and peering at data on her console. “Um ... there's a crater about five meters across in a parking lot about five hundred meters north.”
The sense of anticlimax was palpable. “We were lucky,” Chad breathed. “Very lucky.”
Linda said, “Even so, that crater seems awfully small. SpaceGuard claimed those objects were ten meters across!”
Toth responded, “Most of the bulk would have been heat shields. No way you're going to punch through the atmosphere at those kinds of velocities without shedding most of your mass. The actual payload could have been quite small—particularly if it was supposed to turn into energy when it arrived.”
Their attention turned back toward the display. Sparks were vanishing as they encountered the Earth itself. Someone else announced, “They're not all duds, General. We're getting reports of sporadic explosions. A tsunami in Chesapeake Bay, off Annapolis. Detonations in Boston ... a detonation in Shanghai...” the duty officer continued reading the heads-up display. “The Dnieper dam in Russia.... Now we're washing out. I'm getting lots of static. EMP must have knocked out some of the telemetry.”
The news was sobering, after their giddy relief. “Not everyone was lucky, then,” Chad commented unnecessarily.
“They apparently targeted everything above some threshold size that looked technological,” said Toth. “Cities, dams, canals ... you name it.”
The main display still showed Earth. The swarm of surrounding sparks was gone, but now known nuclear detonations were shown as little red dots. Chad thought they looked like hot coals. New ones kept appearing as the data updates managed to trickle in. There were already way too many of them for comfort. He shuddered again at their narrow escape.
* * * *
Chad was grateful to be alive, if still a bit incredulous. He and Linda were sitting in on the impromptu discussion that had arisen after the attack. It was made the more freewheeling b
y sheer relief. Later, no doubt, there would be formal press conferences and a more measured flow of information. But for now everyone was babbling, and Linda was taking notes for all she was worth.
“No question Earth survived by dumb luck. If all those warheads had caused antimatter explosions there wouldn't be anything bigger than a bacterium left alive. But something like 99 percent didn't work,” Zemani was saying. “So these—aliens, I guess we can say—were playing for keeps. They were quite willing to sterilize a world, or at least obliterate all higher life forms, if they saw even a hint of a threat.”
Chad was amused that Zemani finally used the “A” word.
“Nice people, sir,” Toth said. “We knew they didn't care about collateral damage. Now we know why.”
“Now what?” Chad said, articulating what was on everyone's mind. “Are they going to send another wave of attacks, from Alpha Centauri or something?”
“We haven't seen anything. Not that it would do any good if we saw something. Our only hope would be that any new attackers will be as decrepit as the ones in the Solar System.”
“Particularly if they have QM communications, as you'd suggested previously, sir,” Toth commented. “They'll know right away.”
“Of course, that doesn't mean they can get here right away. Even though their warheads obviously had some highly advanced propulsion. They sure got here quickly for being stationed in heliocentric orbit. And the way they dodged...” Toth suddenly looked uneasy, “Of course, I suppose we don't really know wherethey were stashed, at that.”
“So maybe they couldhave come from Alpha Centauri, for all we know?” Linda asked, her recorder still running unobtrusively.
“Probably not,” Zemani replied. “Why bring the warheads in from space in that case? Why not just quantum-teleport them directly onto the Earth?”
Toth nodded slowly. “Good point, sir. Another one in our favor, maybe.”
“Since so many of them were duds, why did their targeting work in the first place?” Chad asked no one in particular.
Toth answered, “Actually, that's easy to understand. The antimatter conversion somehow relies on large-scale quantum coherence. That's going to be the first thing to go wrong.” He continued thoughtfully, “At least it shows their technology isn't supernatural. The thing that we'd expect to fail first, did fail first.”
Linda mused, “Maybe the aliens don't even exist anymore. The disrepair of their equipment sure suggests they haven't been maintaining it. A century ago a physicist named Enrico Fermi wondered why there were no obvious aliens around. Maybe the reason's that somebody's been policing the neighborhood. Maybe we're latecomers fortunate enough to arise when the policing is decaying. Like those old movies where the booby traps protecting the ancient tomb have fallen apart.”
“They might even have destroyed themselves by now, between their paranoia and their easy antimatter conversion,” Chad added.
“We can't assume that, though,” Zemani said. “Even if only a handful survive, they're as far beyond us as nanoelectronics is beyond Faraday.”
“So what do we do?” Linda demanded. “At this point trying to defend ourselves would be like lining up the war canoes in front of an aircraft carrier.”
“Obviously, we have to figure out their technologies. We have their duds to take apart. That should help a lot. We're looking at a crash research program. Programs, plural.”
Chad observed, “There's more than just the military implications. It will revolutionize energy, for one thing. Everything we're doing now is going to be obsolete.”
Linda said, “But the military implications, unfortunately, are not just against aliens. That whole issue is wide open again. The first power on Earth that figures out the antimatter conversion will have a staggering advantage. Maybe we'll blow ourselves up before the aliens even have a chance to come back.”
Zemani nodded. “Yes, we'd thought of that, too. It's going to be very tricky. Of course, if the aliens had wanted to convince humanity it had a common enemy, they couldn't have chosen a better way. So maybe that will help.”
Chad looked at the holo of Earth hanging in space. “We'd better hope so, huh?”
Copyright © 2007 Lee Goodloe
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
SCIENCE FACT: I COULDN'T READ YOU, E. T.
by HENRY HONKEN
Alien languages may be a lot harder to learn than you'd think, considering anatomical differences and the hidden complexities even in human languages.
Introduction
It's finally happened. We've found them or they've found us. Strange as something out of a hashish dream, they're like nothing we've seen or imagined, not at all what Encounters of the Third Kind has taught us to expect. But they're intelligent, have a language and culture, and can travel between the stars. It's a moment without parallel in human history, taut with danger, ripe with promise. In order to guard against the danger, however, or exploit the promise, we have to communicate and there's the rub.
How do you communicate with a being from a totally different evolution?
Aliens have been a favorite theme in science fiction since at least the time of Wells and hundreds of stories have been written about the first encounter with intelligent nonhumans. Often enough, authors have avoided dealing with language problems by supposing the aliens have a magic translation machine or use telepathy or already speak our language, learned (God help us) from our radio broadcasts. But the situation may not be that simple. After all, how many of us have managed in college to master even another human language?
Nevertheless, in many science-fiction stories, humans learn an alien language with no more difficulty than they would experience in mastering one of the more forbidding human languages such as Hua, Tsez, Salish, or Dyirbal1. And aside from advanced technology—teaching machines and the like—they learn it in the same way they would learn Tsez or Hua: by listening to alien vocalizations, matching them to concepts, and trying to reproduce them.
Many scientists believe that the carbon-based protoplasm used by living creatures on Earth is the universal stuff of life and it may be that the languages we humans have invented are also cut to a universal pattern. But there are other possibilities and in the remaining three sections of this article, I would like to explore one that hasn't been much used by science fiction writers (or taken into account by SETI scientists, for that matter): that we might be able to hear the sounds our alien informant makes, but not process them.
In section two, we will look at some interesting data from animal studies. Section three will present some current theories of how speech is produced and perceived. And in the final section, I will consider some of the possibilities.
* * * *
Aliens We Know
We can't study alien speech directly, but we do have access to nonhumans in the form of the other animals. Many of these communicate by sound and both birds and mammals have a vocal tract. Since, unlike human language, animal calls seem to be both instinctive and non-semantic, we might doubt we can learn anything about language by studying animal call systems. As it turns out, we can learn a great deal.
There have been several attempts to teach chimpanzees to speak a human language. In one of these, the chimpanzee learned to articulate three words—"momma,” “poppa,” and “cup.” More recent attempts to communicate with nonhuman primates have made use of gesture languages like ASL (American Sign Language). At a minimum, these studies provide evidence that apes can learn to use symbols to convey information.
If so, this presents us with a paradox: some birds can imitate human speech without understanding it2, while apes seem to understand human concepts, but can't produce articulate speech. To resolve this paradox, we have to take a closer look at primate “languages.”
All primates have call systems. Traditionally, calls were thought of as wholly instinctive, like human cries of pain, but the research of primatologists over the last decade has shown that this view is
too simplistic.
One common type of call is the alarm call, analogous to a human scream of fear. In the traditional view, an alarm call is an automatic reaction to danger and does not carry any information. But Tom Struhsaker of the New York Zoological Society, in field studies carried out in the ‘60s, noted that East African vervet monkeys seem to have three distinct alarm calls, each cued by a different predator.
This suggested that the calls conveyed information as well as emotion. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, who also studied vervet monkeys, were able to confirm this in their investigations. They recorded the three calls and played them from a concealed loudspeaker. In each case, the monkeys reacted appropriately to a given call; a leopard call sent them scrambling into the trees; an eagle call made them look up or run down from the trees; on hearing a snake call, they stood up and peered into the grass.
In other field trips, Cheney and Seyfarth studied a call that earlier researchers termed a “contact grunt,” a harsh sound like clearing the throat, used in a variety of social situations. Although all vervet grunts sound more or less alike to human ears, the researchers discovered that vervets distinguish four grunts, each with a different meaning. The vervets vocalized when approaching a dominant animal, when approaching a subordinate, on seeing a member of the troop move into an open area, on encountering another vervet troop. Moreover, when recorded and analyzed, each grunt proved to have a different acoustic structure.
In one set of experiments, Cheney and Seyfarth recorded some thirty calls from one female vervet and analyzed them in terms of sixteen acoustic features such as length, frequency peaks, etc. They then recorded 216 tokens3 of all four types of grunt from thirteen other individuals. They found that in over 80% of their data, a particular acoustic structure was associated with each social context. That is, where humans hear a single, undifferentiated grunt, the monkeys are telling us by their behavior that they hear four and they react to each one in a different manner.
Other primates make similar distinctions. For example, Steven Green performed experiments in which Japanese macaques were rewarded for their ability to distinguish between coos (described in Cheney and Seyfarth, 1990: 123). There are two varieties of coo in the macaque call system: smooth early highs have an initial peak and fall abruptly while smooth late highs rise in pitch and peak near the end.
Analog SFF, May 2007 Page 7
