Counting on Beauty: The role of aesthetic, ethical, and physical universal principles for interstellar communication

Counting on Beauty: The role of aesthetic, ethical,
and physical universal principles for
interstellar communication.

Guillermo A. Lemarchand

1. Introduction:

The land lies sleeping under the enveloping mantle of night. Bright stars gleam like jewels from the velvet darkness. Beyond these points of celestial beauty, in depths frightening in their sheer immensity, lie realms of stellar glory. And beyond again—for there always must be a beyond—the Milky Way trails its tenuous gown of stardust across the heavens. Billions of planets, stars, and galaxies, dancing in a cosmic symphony. Vast and old beyond understanding, the universe makes us feel lonely. From our earliest days, humans have strongly sensed that this endless majesty is too immense to be contemplated only by terrestrial intelligence. One thread that links the ancient Greek philosophers with modern space scientists is the desire to know whether there are other inhabited worlds with sentient creatures with whom we are share the vast beauty of the cosmos. It forces us to ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite life-bearing planet, and to long for the knowledge that somewhere out there, someone like us is looking upward toward the heavens and having similar thoughts. The Principle of Mediocrity assumes that anything seemingly unique and pecu- liar to us is actually one out of many and is probably average. By this view, the Earth and humans do not occupy a privileged position in the universe. The history of evolution of matter and life on Earth should be typical under the same universal physical laws and similar environmental conditions. Even not expecting the same evolutionary paths, we assume that the sequence of events may have similar patterns: the origin of life, the appearance of complex life; the emergence of intelligence, the development of culture and technology, and membership in the community of galactic intelligence. For the first time in human history, we are testing the hypothesis that advanced civilizations exist elsewhere. Our search is based in the assumption that any advanced intelligent species must develop certain technological tools to explore their cosmic environment. The use of advanced technologies for that exploration would generate signals so different from any natural cosmic source, that if we detect them, we will be able to identify them as artificial. Behind an artificial interstellar signal, there must be some intelligent creature with the capacity to solve very complex problems.

To appear in Between Worlds: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition, Douglas Vakoch (ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2006. 2 How should we build a common language to exchange information and wisdom across the galaxy? Would such a hypothetical universal language, or Lingua Cosmica, let a civilization communicate its accumulated knowledge, as well as the differing perceptions, sensations and emotions of its species? We will explore these questions in the following essay.

2. Epistemic bases for an interstellar language

We introduce the term “cognitive map” to clarify the concept of paradigms, often discussed by philosophers of science (e.g., Kuhn, 1962). Cognitive mapping refers to the process by which an organism makes representations of its environment in its own processing system.
Features of the physical environment are only some of the significant parts of human cognitive maps. Our cognitive maps must represent such varied objects as living beings and their behavior, linguistic abstractions, aesthetic judgments, and ethical values. With the emergence of symbolic language, environments can be described in words. Not limited to mapping only sensory perceptions, language permits the mapping of concepts as well. With languages and their rules, one can reconstruct events that occur in time. Through language, our species learned how to cooperate in space and time. To create such an interstellar language, we must propose a set of conjectures to transform our human cognitive maps into cognitive universals. A Lingua Cosmica might provide an instrument for interspecies cooperation. From an ethical point of view, the last may be possible as a consequence of some sort of Principle of Universal Fraternity, in which advanced intelligent societies choose to help other species in order to maximize the development of potentialities for all the expres- sions of life in the universe.
Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) showed that particular languages, through their grammatical structures, influence the kinds of thoughts people have, their ways of perceiving the world, and their ways of conceiving themselves. The process of learning a language recreates in a new generation the habits of mi

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