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Extraterrestrial Languages (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R523
Discovery Miles 5 230
You Save: R140
(21%)
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Extraterrestrial Languages (Hardcover)
Series: The MIT Press
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Was R663
Loot Price R523
Discovery Miles 5 230
You Save R140 (21%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings
receive it? Will they understand? The endlessly fascinating
question of whether we are alone in the universe has always been
accompanied by another, more complicated one: if there is
extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? In this
book, Daniel Oberhaus leads readers on a quest for extraterrestrial
communication. Exploring Earthlings' various attempts to reach out
to non-Earthlings over the centuries, he poses some not entirely
answerable questions: If we send a message into space, will
extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? What
languages will they (and we) speak? Is there not only a universal
grammar (as Noam Chomsky has posited), but also a grammar of the
universe? Oberhaus describes, among other things, a
late-nineteenth-century idea to communicate with Martians via Morse
code and mirrors; the emergence in the twentieth century of SETI
(the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), CETI (communication
with extraterrestrial intelligence), and finally METI (messaging
extraterrestrial intelligence); the one-way space voyage of Ella,
an artificial intelligence agent that can play cards, tell
fortunes, and recite poetry; and the launching of a theremin
concert for aliens. He considers media used in attempts at
extraterrestrial communication, from microwave systems to plaques
on spacecrafts to formal logic, and discusses attempts to formulate
a language for our message, including the Astraglossa and two
generations of Lincos (lingua cosmica). The chosen medium for
interstellar communication reveals much about the technological
sophistication of the civilization that sends it, Oberhaus
observes, but even more interesting is the information embedded in
the message itself. In Extraterrestrial Languages, he considers how
philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, science, and art have
informed the design or limited the effectiveness of our
interstellar messaging.
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