Articles About Message Construction

Will ET's Math Be the Same as Ours?

Article written by Dr. Douglas Vakoch
Originally published on January 11 2001 at Space.com

There is an ongoing debate among philosophers of science about how "real" scientific theories are. To what extent do our theories provide an accurate mirror of the structure of the universe?

SETI provides a fresh perspective on this issue by encouraging us to ask questions about the universality of science and mathematics as we humans know them. To what extent is our scientific knowledge bound by our cultures, our particular history or even by our biology?

What might science on another world be like? Does the fact that two civilizations share a common technology for the transmission of electromagnetic radiation imply that they have equivalent versions of physics or mathematics?

In the process of attempting to answer these sorts of questions, we are forced to consider ways in which human science and math might depend on factors that may not apply to other civilizations on other worlds.

Would ETs mathematics be the same as ours?

Its striking to note how differently a computer scientist, say, and a psychologist might answer the same question. For example, artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology maintains that extraterrestrial intelligence would necessarily comprehend arithmetic as we know it. He argues that all intelligent beings will need to deal with universal constraints of space, time and matter. In the process, they will discover ideas and processes that are mathematically equivalent to ours, and this could serve as a basis for communication of more complex concepts.

Cognitive psychologist Louis Narens, from the University of California at Irvine, is a bit more skeptical. He contends that while any intelligence with advanced technology may indeed know elementary arithmetic, this does not require that they have the general concept of "natural number." Instead, their mathematics may operate only on particular natural numbers.

As Narens makes his point, "For SETI this means that one should be wary of the use of concepts such as prime number or a binary form of the decimal expansion of pi as a common basis for communication with ETIs." Thus, in contrast to the initial message received by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, perhaps we shouldnt count on an easy message starting with the first few prime numbers (numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, 11).

Even if we detect a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, the process of decoding any message in it could be a long and arduous process. In the meantime, more in-depth discussion of these issues may help prepare us for decoding information-rich signals we might someday receive. As an added bonus, we would be better prepared to devise more intelligible messages of our own if humankind decides sometime in the future to transmit its own directed greetings to other civilizations.

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