From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Thu May 15 2008 - 11:58:41 PDT
Creative Writing for Extraterrestrials
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0515/p20s01-woam.html
A college class, funded by a NASA Space Grant Consortium, contemplates
what to say to E.T.
By Michelle Nijhuis | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the May 15, 2008 edition
LARAMIE, WYO. - On the windswept campus of the University of Wyoming,
spring is struggling to arrive, students are fighting their way
through finals, and Jeffrey Lockwood's creative writing class is
grappling with how to talk to aliens. And they're not kidding.
"So, what this is really about is a cosmic first date?" Professor
Lockwood teases the class. "You want to look good, but not fake?"
His 11 students, gathered for their final meeting of the semester, are
discussing how to describe humanity to other civilizations. Should
they put our best collective foot forward, and tell stories that
illustrate altruism and romantic love? Should they also explain lying
and warfare?
There are no easy answers. "I leave here with a headache a lot," says
graduate creative-writing student Christina Ingoglia. "We're always
constructing our audience. We can't assume a basic understanding of
language – we can't assume anything."
During one of the semester's first classes, Lockwood asked the
students to summarize the human condition in 250 words, then 50, then
10. While some students chose the poetic – "We are an adolescent
species searching for our identity," wrote English major Ann Stebner –
Ms. Ingoglia stuck with the anatomical. "Two arms, two legs, head,
torso, symmetrical," she thought, would be a safer way to introduce
humanity to an unknown world. "Then I realized that we're sending out
all sorts of messages anyway, through radio waves," Ingoglia says, and
she got bolder.
One of her projects, a series of fictional eulogies, takes a core
sample of human diversity, describing the lives and deaths of an
infant, a drag queen, an American soldier, and others through the eyes
of loved ones.
English 4050/5560, otherwise known as "Interstellar Message
Composition," is the first class to enlist creative writers in a
potential cosmic conversation. Funded in part by the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration's Wyoming Space Grant Consortium,
it's designed to fill a practical – if extremely theoretical – need.
"We've thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds,
but we haven't thought much about what we'd actually say," says
Lockwood, a professor of natural science and humanities.
Humans have dreamed about conversing with extraterrestrials for
centuries. We've considered lighting kerosene-filled canals in the
Sahara Desert; we've listened for radio signals from Mars; and we've
sent NASA spacecraft aloft with representations of human beings and
the solar system, and recordings of the Brandenburg Concerto and
"Johnny B. Goode."
In recent decades, while a few scientists have deliberately sent
specific radio messages skyward, most have allowed humanity's daily
buzz of signals to speak for itself. Extraterrestrial communication,
after all, has significant political implications, and researchers
have found it less controversial, and more efficient, to simply listen
to the universe. But as powerful radiotelescopes allow astronomers to
study stars in greater numbers and at greater distances, the chances
of running into another civilization – while still considered
infinitesimal – are better than ever.
"It could be tomorrow that we'll need to be ready to decide if we
should reply," says Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message
composition for the nonprofit SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
Dr. Vakoch, who advises and has visited Lockwood's class, says
decisions about whether and how to answer shouldn't be made by
researchers alone. "I think it's really critical to have people start
thinking about it – and it makes sense to start with writers," he
says. "These are people who are really trying to express the human
condition."
The work of creative writers could also inspire a more interesting
conversation. "If all we end up talking about is 'Yeah, we know the
Pythagorean theorem, too,' I'll be disappointed," says Lockwood. "I
want to know something that challenges my parochial views of the
universe."
In Lockwood's classroom, the questions continue. How might
extraterrestrials communicate? Would they be able to see and hear, or
only see, or have a sense completely foreign to us? Might they have
technology able to translate human language, or would they better
understand messages written in mathematical patterns, or with an
extremely limited vocabulary? Through the semester, the students have
experimented with all these possibilities. Graduate student Dixie
Thoman presents a poem about menstruation, with syllables arranged in
a Fibonacci sequence, and a poem that describes giving birth in only
four words: pain, loud, force, breath.
The class, which includes a buffalo rancher, a university accountant
who sculpts in his spare time, and psychology and journalism students
alongside the creative writers, often disagreed. For the first several
weeks of the class, English major Spencer Pittman argued against
sending any fiction or poetry into the cosmos, favoring encyclopedia-
style entries instead. "Why bother with another layer of cryptology?"
he asks.
But in the course of the semester, he's changed his mind. "There are
some things you can't convey without art," he says now.
The students ultimately discovered more commonalities than
differences. "Birth came up a lot, death came up a lot," says Marissa
Johnson-Valenzuela, a graduate student in creative writing. "We found
out what's left when you take away all the minor stuff." And they all
came to agree that when it comes to communicating big ideas, it's best
to start small, with stories rather than grand abstractions.
Lockwood, who trained as an entomologist before venturing into
philosophy and creative writing, found that the class drew on all his
disparate interests. "Some insects can see into the ultraviolet
spectrum, and can't see red light – others are acutely sensitive to
odors, while we're basically blind to odors," he says. "Their world is
not our world, and in some ways that primed me to be very interested
in what it is to think and understand in a way that's radically
different from our own."
After the close of the semester, the students will send their writings
to Vakoch and his colleagues at the SETI Institute, where their
efforts may one day inspire a message to another world. While the
chances of their stories, poems, and reflections finding a nonhuman
audience are extraordinarily slim, Lockwood says that even the whisper
of that possibility has kept his class engaged with the problem. And
if his students' work is never heard – or understood – by its intended
recipients, they'll still have learned something about the fundamental
difficulties of interpersonal communication.
"In a sense," Lockwood says, "all writing is writing for extraterrestrials."
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