Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
Sagan's statement "Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence" hasbeen restated many times in the history of science. My graduate advisor called it the"Principle of Minimum Astonishment", and it's really a consequence of Occam'sRazor, the idea that the simplest explanation that fits all the data is probably thecorrect one. Given an outlandish claim with weak or absent supporting evidence, thesimplest and most probable explanation is that the person making the claim is wrong.
One of the most controversial expressions of this concept was philosopher David Hume'scriterion for scientific acceptance of miracles. He stated that the evidence would have tobe of such quality that it would be a bigger miracle for the evidence to be faulty thanfor the miracle itself to have happened.
Lots of people attack science for having too stringent standards of evidence. That'slike complaining it's unfair for a marathon to be 26 miles because many people can't runthat far. If you want to run a marathon, you practice until you can run 26 miles,or accept the fact that you can't do it. If you want your ideas accepted as science, youhave to meet the standards of evidence.
The Cosmos episode recounts the September 19, 1961 adventure of Betty& Barney Hill, who were supposedly abducted by an alien spacecraft. This incident,written up by John G. Fuller (a prolific author of this sort of stuff) as TheInterrupted Journey, is considered a classic UFO encounter. Under hypnosis, Mrs. Hillrecalled seeing an alien star map that supposedly included the Sun and a number of nearbystars, including some that were discovered after the alleged incident.
As Sagan notes, the alleged fit is not very good, and given the number of stars nearthe sun, it's surprising that nobody could find a better fit. Properly used, hypnosis canrecover forgotten or suppressed memories, improperly used, it can reflect theinterviewer's own fantasies or, worse yet, implant false memories. It's entirely possibleMrs. Hill did recall a star map, but one she had seen somewhere, maybe in anastronomy book. The stars, of course, were stars visible from Earth.
A lot of people believe the subconscious mind is a faithful recorder of information.Dreams are widely supposed to be a good way of generating creative ideas by either gettingaround mental blocks or by recovering information that the conscious mind has forgotten. Ihad a couple of interesting dreams that reveal just what sort of nonsense the subconsciousis capable of dredging up. They're an interesting counterpoint to the widespread myth thatthe subconscious is especially creative or accurate in retaining memories.
Paranormalists, hypnotists, spiritualists and others would have us believe thesubconscious is a perfect recorder of information, able to integrate information that thehobbled conscious mind cannot. I'm not going to deny that for some people dreams mayprovide access to forgotten or blocked information, but in my experience, my subconscioushas repeatedly failed to retrieve
information that my conscious mind has no trouble whatever recalling. My dreams seemto be nothing more than random memory dumps. I suppose on occasion some random bitflushed out in a dream may inspire someone to think along new lines and thereby lead to acreative insight, but such an event is purely random. Flipping randomly through anencyclopedia is just as likely to inspire new ideas.
The term "Close Encounter of Third Kind", used in the episode and title of a1977 film by Steven Spielberg, refers to a scale of alien encounter evidence:
Despite lots of speculation ranging in luridness from Spock's half-human, half-Vulcanancestry to the downright pornographic, encounters of the third kind are extremelyunlikely to be sexual. First of all:
The video shows remarkable footage of a meteor that nearly hit the earth on August 10,1972. The object, about the size of a bus, entered the atmosphere over Utah and firstbecame visible at an altitude of 76 kilometers. It traveled nearly due north, reaching aminimum altitude of 58 kilometers over southwestern Montana, then exited the Earth'satmosphere near Calgary, Alberta. Heated by its passage, it faded from visibility at analtitude of 102 kilometers. Although the meteor was visible a total of 101seconds, was visible at any one spot for less than 30 seconds, passed over a sparselyinhabited region and was completely unexpected, we nevertheless have dozens of clearphotographs of the event. The footage in the video was shot by a woman who tracked theobject so perfectly that when it reappeared from behind some clouds, it was stillperfectly centered in the frame. An observer in Canada photographed the object exitingback into space. A complete report is in the July, 1974 issue of Sky and Telescope.
Where is there a single UFO apparition with this kind of documentation?
1801 - Joseph Fourier and Jean Francois Champollion
Rosetta Stone 1799
1828 - Champollion's visit to Egypt
Champollion/Young translation
Hieroglyphics
Demotic
Greek
Symbol Count = letters
Some ideograms
Impressive as Champollion's work was, it was almost trivial because he had threeparallel texts. Much more impressive, and relevant to communicating withextraterrestrials), are languages that were deciphered with no parallel texts.The translation of Babylonian cuneiform by Georg Friedrich Grotefend is a good example.Cuneiform, from Latin words meaning "wedge shaped," was created by impressingtriangular dents into clay. These markings are very simple. There is no question of theirbeing obscure symbols or pictographs - they are obviously letters or syllables.
First of all, lack of material is not a problem with cuneiform. Markings were impressedinto wet clay, which hardened. Often an invading army would burn the town where therecords were kept, obligingly baking them and helping to preserve them even better. Andtablets have been unearthed by the thousands - they were often pretty prosaic stuff likeledgers, official proclamations, and so on.
The nice thing about this material is that it is so repetitious. The fact thatthe formats are so similar gives us clues as to what the records are about. And that'swhat Grotefend took advantage of. You have to love his reasoning, which was basically:"empires may rise and empires may fall, but bureaucrats are the same forever."Grotefend reasoned that a lot of official royal documents started with the same header:"King x, son of y, son of z, etc... proclaims such and such." He was thus ableto identify the standard "boilerplate" text and identify names. He was then ableto place the names in sequence and match the sequence against royal chronologies fromother sources. This matching enabled him to determine what sounds were represented by whatsymbols and the rest is, well, history. With sounds established, plus the fact that thelanguage was Semitic, it was possible to guess at word meanings using other relatedlanguages. The reasoning is wonderful: Empires rise and empires fall, but bureaucrats are the same forever."
When the Spanish came to Central America, they discovered that the Maya had the onlyelaborate written language in the Americas. The Maya had thousands of books written inhieroglyphics. The Spanish, seeing these books as perpetuating both pagan cults and nativeresistance, destroyed them all. Only five are known to have survived. Innumerable stoneinscriptions also remain across the former Maya world.
The hero-villain of this piece is Diego de Landa, a complex, paradoxical figure whodefies easy pigeonholing. On the one hand he was one of the principal forces behinddestruction of the Maya literature. On the other hand he protested mistreatment of thenatives to the point where his enemies had him sent back to Spain to face trial,ironically on trumped up charges of mistreating the natives himself. And de Landa left ussome of the most detailed accounts we have of the Maya at the time of the Spanishconquest.
When I was in college, Maya hieroglyphs were considered the archetypical example of alanguage lost forever. Now it is considered at least 85 per cent decipherable. One of thebreakthroughs was in the analysis of language structure, an outgrowth of research incryptography, that enables linguists to identify the structures of a passage even if themeaning is unknown.
Another breakthrough was re-interpretation of de Landa's writings. De Landa had writtendown a Maya "alphabet," which had long been known to be wrong. But in 1960, YuriKnozorov asked "de Landa was too careful an observer to have been completelymistaken. He was recording something. What was it?" The obvious answer:syllables. When de Landa recorded a sign as corresponding to "b", it wasn't theletter, but the name of the letter, in Spanish the syllable "bay." All of asudden several dozen syllables and many words became readable. Since Maya is stillextensively spoken in Central America, other words and syllables became clear fromcontext.
None of these examples is a perfect analogy with communicating with aliens. All, insome sense, had a "parallel text" in that they could be linked to knownlanguages. Even an utterly unconnected human language of unknown affinity would still begenerated by a human brain, with at least some similarity to our own. Still, the varietyof human languages and the logic employed in them is impressive; there are plenty ofaliens right here on Earth.
Interstellar Messages - Cosmic Rosetta Stone
Arecibo Radio Telescope
Could communicate with replica of itself 15,000 l.y. away
How far away can the Sun be seen?
The famous Frank Drake equation, a formula for estimating the number of intelligentcivilizations in our galaxy, has been called by astronomer Jill Tarter "a wonderfultool for organizing our ignorance." It tells us what we need to know to answer thequestion, and how far we are from being able to do so. The equation consists of a numberof terms all multiplied together:
Could we be alone?
Assumptions about extraterrestrials
Older?
Wiser?
Less Aggressive?
Possible effects of contact
Self-destruction not inevitable?
Culture Shock?
Could we have been visited?
Why aren't they here?
We're the first or only
Unknown problems
Non-interference
A Big Galaxy
Star Wars Unlikely?
Technological Imbalance?
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Created 13 January 1998, Last Update 3 May 2000