“The letter is written in an ‘acultural’ language, but still possesses an element of the culture of the Senders. Is that right? Is this where the difficulty lies?”
“Where one of the difficulties lies. The Senders differ from us both in culture and in knowledge, and let us call that knowledge scientific. For this reason the difficulty is at least two-level. We cannot divine their culture — not now, and not, I believe, in a thousand years. They must know this perfectly well. Therefore they have sent the sort of information for whose deciphering no knowledge of their culture is required. That is almost definite.”
“And so the cultural factor should present no obstacle?”
“Senator, we do not even know what is presenting the obstacle to us. We have evaluated the entire letter with respect to its complexity. The complexity is such that it corresponds roughly to a class of systems known to us — social and biological. We have no theory of social systems, thus we were forced to use, as models ‘placed against’ the letter, genotypes — or, rather, not the genotypes themselves, but the mathematical apparatus employed in the study of them. We learned that an object even more similar to the code is a living cell — or a whole living organism. From which it does not follow that the letter is actually a kind of genotype, but only that out of all the things known to us which, for comparison, we ‘set against’ the code, the genotype is the most helpful. Do you see the tremendous risk this carries with it?”
“Not exactly. It would seem that the only risk is that if the code is not, after all, a genotype, then your deciphering will not succeed. There is more?”
“We are proceeding like a man who looks for a lost thing not everywhere, but only beneath a lighted street lamp, because there it is bright. Have you ever seen a tape for an automatic piano — a player piano?”
“Of course. It comes in a roll, with perforations.”
“By chance, a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano, and although the program has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with music — it might refer to some fifth-order equation — nevertheless, when it is put in the machine, it produces notes. And it might also happen that not all the notes thus produced will be in total chaos, but that here and there one will hear some musical phrase. Can you guess why I use this example?”
“I think I can. You believe that Frog Eggs is a ‘musical phrase’ caused by inserting in a player piano a tape that really belongs in a digital machine?”
“Yes. That is exactly what I believe. One who puts a digital tape in a player piano is making a mistake, and it is entirely possible that we have taken precisely such a mistake for success.”
“Yes, but your two research teams, wholly independently of each other, produced Frog Eggs and Lord of the Flies — one and the same substance!”
“If you have a player piano in your house, and are unaware of the existence of digital computers, and the same is true of your neighbor, then, if you find some tape from a digital computer, it is very probable that both of you will do the same — you will conclude that the tape is meant for the player piano, because you possess no knowledge of other possibilities.”
“I understand. This is, then, your hypothesis?”
“This is my hypothesis.”
“You spoke of a tremendous risk. Where is it?”
“Substituting a computer tape for a player piano tape does not, obviously, involve risk; it is a harmless misunderstanding. But in our case it could be otherwise, and the consequences of a mistake could prove incalculable.”
“How so?”
“I do not know. What I have in mind is the kind of error whereby someone reads, in a kitchen recipe, the word ‘amanita’ instead of ‘amandine,’ and concocts a dish that sends all his guests to their graves. Please keep in mind that we have done what lay within our power to do, and so imposed our knowledge — our perhaps simplified or erroneous notions — on the code.”
McMahon asked how this was possible if it was so very like the breaking of a cipher. He had seen Lord of the Flies. Could one decipher a code incorrectly and still obtain such astounding results? Could the fragment of the translation that was Lord of the Flies be completely false?
“It is possible,” I replied. “If we were to send, telegraphically, the genotype of a man, and the receiver were able to synthesize, on the basis of that, only white blood cells, he would end up with amoebalike things as well as an enormous amount of unused information. One cannot say that he who produces corpuscles, having before him the human genotype, has read the message correctly.”
“The difference is on that order?”
“Yes. We made use of two to four percent of the entire code; but that is not all, because within that small percent there could be a full third that is guesswork: i.e., all that we ourselves put into the translation, from our knowledge of stereochemistry, physics, and so on. If the genotype of man were read to a similarly low degree, one could not even construct white blood cells. At the most, something in the nature of a lifeless protein suspension — nothing more. I think, incidentally, that conducting precisely such experiments with the human genotype — which already has been deciphered to about seventy percent — would be extremely instructive for us; but we cannot do this, because we have neither the time nor the resources.”
When he asked me what I thought was the difference in development that separated us from the Senders, I said that although the statistics of von Hoerner and Brace indicated that the highest probability was for a first encounter to be with a civilization having an age of about twelve thousand years, I believed that there was a real possibility that the Senders were as much as a billion years old. Otherwise, the transmitting of a “life-causing” signal would not have any rational justification, since it could produce no effect in the course of a mere millennium.
“They must have governments with rather lengthy terms of office,” observed McMahon. He also wanted to know my opinion as to the value of continuing the research, if matters stood as they did.
“Suppose a young thief robs you,” I said, “of your checkbook and six hundred dollars in cash. Although he can do nothing with the checks and cannot touch the millions in your account, he will not consider that he has done badly, because for him six hundred dollars is a lot of money.”
“And we are the young thief?”
“Yes. The crumbs from the table of the higher civilization can feed us for centuries. . . provided we behave sensibly.”
I could have added something to this, but bit my tongue.
He wished to know my private view of the letter and the Senders.
“They are not practical — at least not in a way that we can understand,” I said. “Do you have any idea, Senator, of what their ‘personal expenses’ must be? Let us say that they have at their disposal energy on the order of 1049 ergs. The power of a single star — and that is the power needed to send the signal — is for them what for us, in this country, would be the power of one large hydroelectric plant. Would our government agree to expend — for hundreds, for thousands of years — the power of a facility like Boulder Dam in order to make possible the emergence of life on the planets of other stars, assuming such a thing, given so microscopic a supply of energy, were possible?”
“We are too poor. . .”
“Yes, but the percentage of energy to be consumed in this deed of altruism would be the same in both cases.”
“A dime out of a dollar is not the same, financially, as a million dollars out of ten million.”
“And we have those millions, don’t we. The physical space separating us from that civilization is less than the moral distance, because we on Earth have starving masses of people, while their concern is that life should arise on the planets of Centaurus, Cygnus, and Cassiopeia. I do not know what the letter contains, but — from this standpoint — it cannot contain anything that would bring harm to us. The one would be at too great a variance with the other. Yes, of course, it is possible to choke even on bread. This is the way I see it: if we, with our political systems and our history, represent a cosmic average, then nothing threatens us from the ‘letter.’ That is what you asked about, I believe? Because they must be well aware of this ‘psychozoic constant’ of the Universe. If we constitute a slight aberration, a minority, then that, too, they will take — must have taken, that is — into account. But if we are an extraordinary exception to the rule, a deviant form, a monstrous abnormality that occurs in one galaxy per thousand, once in ten billion years — such a possibility they would be right, in their calculations and in their intentions, not to take into account. In other words, one way or the other they will not be to blame.”