Mamilahpinatapai

MAMILAHPINATAPAI AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL COMMUNICATION

May 31, 2018

TIERRA DEL FUEGO EVOKES A SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE, like few other geographical names. For thousands of years the Yaghan community, living at the end of the world, in a remote cold, barren land, now near Port Ushuaia, would light fires on the shores, to call neighboring people to the feast of eating fish or, in a good year, a whale. The windy strait is speckled with rocky islands teeming with aquatic wildlife. Black-striped Magellanic penguins and orange-beaked Gentoo penguins waddle across the shore of the Yécapasela Reserve on Isla Martillo, oblivious to people nearby. South American sea lions and fur seals lounge on craggy coastlines. Since Magellan sailed by - and for centuries later - these fires - and the community – survived. Cristina Calderón is the last person in the world to speak the Yaghan language fluently. She does not recognize Mamilahpinatapai, an archaic word, of her fast-disappearing language, that showed up in a dictionary two centuries ago. Its muddled, obtuse meaning, something akin to “the awkwardness that two people feel facing each other, wanting to do something together but not ready to initiate it” - like the look of two lovers - is described by the Guinness book of records as the world’s most succinct word. We probably will never know the exact meaning of the word. Or will we?

GEORGE BOOLE WAS AN IRISHMAN WHOSE FATHER WAS A COBBLER, very much interested in science and mathematics. He taught his son well, but was so poor that he could not afford to pay for better schools and, when the time came, for university. George became so knowledgeable and so determined to explore mathematics that today’s technological world would not exist without his contributions. He became a full professor at Cork University, without ever graduating, and did research on Invariance, an obscure but important branch of mathematics. He also wrote a book, in 1847, on his basic research of logic, called Boolean algebra, where the values of the variables are not decimal numbers, like it is commonly the case, but True or False and the operations are not addition or multiplication but conjunction (and), disjunction (or), and negation (not). The logic of computers today is based on Boolean algebra. Astonishingly, it took the world more that 70 years to understand how to apply Boolean Algebra to mathematical operations by means of electronic circuits. The circuits are logical gates of information based in 1s and 0s, called the binary system.

ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS A POSTAL CLERK WHO LOVED PHYSICS and eventually became so adept at it that he won the Nobel Prize for that discipline in 1921. A great part of his initial work was based on Boole’s Theory on Invariance. Einstein’s invariant number is the physical constant of the speed of light, denoted by a lower case “c”. Although it is hard to believe, this speed has been measured. In one second light travels 300,000 kilometers or 186,000 miles. This is fast. For example, since the Moon is 300,000 kilometers away from us, the time it takes the light of the Sun reflected by the Moon to come to Earth is one full second. The Moon is the body in space that is closest to us.

BECAUSE DISTANCES ARE SO GREAT IN THE UNIVERSE, physicists and astronomers decided that, instead of saying how far the stars were from Earth, measured in kilometers, they would say how far the stars were from Earth measured in the time it took the light to come to Earth. Although it sounds very strange, instead of measuring in kilometers, we now measure distances in space, in time-distance values, called light-years/hours/minutes/seconds. Therefore, we can say that the Sun is 8 minutes and 17 seconds away from us, at the speed of light, instead of saying that it is 149.600 000 kilometers away. Since the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is at a distance 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers or 9.5 trillion kilometers, we can more easily say that the nearest star to the sun is 4.2 light-years away. There is another important aspect to this distance and time component. If the light from the nearest star is 4.2 light- years away, this also means that the light that we see now coming from the star left that star 4.2 years ago. That is the time it has taken the light to reach us on Earth. An important consequence of this: we are looking directly at the past, in this case 4.2 years ago, when we see the light coming from the stars! This is as if, instead of a telescope to look at the stars, we had a magical window where we could now look directly at the Egyptians building their great pyramids 4,425 years ago!

WHEN WE LOOK AT THE UNIVERSE, WE ARE LOOKING AT THE history of the Universe. We know that the distance to the closest galaxy to us, the Great Dog Dwarf Galaxy, is 25,000 light years. And when we see her light, we are seeing the galaxy as it existed 25,000 years ago. We will never be able to see the Galaxy as it exists today because light needs time to travel.

HUBBLE AND A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY. The observation of the sky was of extreme importance to the ancient inhabitants of Earth. We know that Sumerians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Mayas, Aztecs were all involved in stargazing to try to understand the nature of the world they lived in. They looked at the stars for inspiration, information, knowledge and imagination. But they were always limited by one physical constant: the size of the lenses in their eyes. None of them could see much further than others, perhaps with more clarity, but no further, because the lenses inside the eye, after a certain age, cannot change shape. A Dutch eyeglass maker, Hans Lippershey, is credited with the invention of the optical telescope. But it was Galileo who, upon hearing about this invention, manufactured his own, more powerful telescope and, more importantly, first pointed it at the sky. Many others followed him, including Kepler. Newton decided that telescopes with mirrors were better than telescopes with lenses. With these telescopes, astronomers explored our own galaxy, the Milky Way, where our own Solar System is placed, and determined the distance across her as 100,000 light years. Edwin Hubble, a great astronomer, determined that the Andromeda Nebula was a galaxy far, far away. To be exact: two and a half million light-years away, as a matter of fact. Above is a view of Andromeda as seen by the Hubble telescope, floating in space.

KARL JANSKY WAS AN AMERICAN ENGINEER who first detected radio radiation from the sky in 1931. Radiation is, essentially, the transmission of energy. It can manifest itself in many ways. One form is the non-ionizing radiation, which at one extreme is ultraviolet light, that we cannot see but that can burn our skin, for instance, if we sunbathe too long. At the other extreme is thermal radiation, which we also cannot see, but feel as heat. Other radiations fall in between: Visible radiation which is the light spectrum, infrared, microwave, radio waves, very low frequency and extremely low frequency radiations. From these different forms, we can see ascertain that light, radio, microwaves and heat are all made up of radiation waves, some shorter than the others. Because all bodies in the universe emit radiation, telescopes, called radio telescopes, have been built to observe these wave patterns. When these waves are transformed with computers they show up as images, called false color images, that show us the celestial bodies, mainly different types of star and galaxies but many others as well. We are able to see bodies in the universe that are really far, far away with radio telescopes, almost as far as the beginning of the creation of the Universe. The farthest star we have been able to see is Icarus, this time with an optical telescope, the Hubble. It is about nine billion light years away. This was just announced last month!

THE BIG BANG THEORY IS AN EXPLANATION ABOUT how the universe began. At its simplest, it says the universe, as we know it, started with a small singularity, then inflated over the next 13.8 billion years to the cosmos that we know today. In the first second after the universe began, the surrounding temperature was about 10 billion degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 billion Celsius) and it was impossible to see any light because there were so many particles flying around at such incredible speeds. The Big Bang Theory also has an explanation of how the galaxies formed, and from the galaxies, the star systems, like our system where the star is our Sun, and the planets and the moons of planets and gravitational waves that hold all together. Some scientists believe that not only our universe but other, parallel, universes were created as well. We have never seen the edge of the universe, and it keeps expanding so it’s very big. 92 billion light years big. To have an idea of its size, astronomers have made some calculations and they estimate that there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe. That’s 100 followed by nine zeroes. Our Solar system is in the Galaxy called the Milky Way. Scientists estimate that the Milky Way has maybe 100 billion solar systems. So far they have discovered 500. All this leads to one question: If there are so many solar systems in our galaxy and so many galaxies in the Universe, is there any other type of life, apart from ours, in the Universe?

SETI IS THE ACRONYM OF SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL Intelligence. It is also the name of the scientific effort to discover intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, primarily by attempting to discover radio signals that indicate intelligence. Given the considerable size of the Universe the project has set some rules for the search. One of them is that the scientists cannot be looking all over our galaxy that, remember is

100,000 light years in size. So, they have limited the search to 200 light years from the Earth, which makes absolute sense, if you accept the fact that whatever signal gets to us now was sent at most 200 years ago and by the time our response gets back another 200 years will pass. This is a very slow way of communicating.

THERE ARE SEVERAL PREMISES THAT ARE IMPORTANT about communicating with extraterrestrials. One is that the society we communicate with is going to be far more advanced than ours, maybe by thousands of years, maybe by millions of years. So, we don’t know what this is going to do to us. Columbus had no idea what his encounter with another world would do in four hundred years. But our encounter with extraterrestrials will certainly have a tremendous impact. Another aspect of this communication is that it will give us a measure of who we think we are and what we think we are, in the context of the vastness of the universe. It will be a very profound philosophical experience. And, in the third instance, it may give us a sense that we are not doomed, as a society, to disappear. It means that other space civilizations have found ways and managed to survive. But all of this is sheer speculation on everyone’s part. Because if the degree of difference between these extraterrestrials and ourselves is equivalent to that between ants and humans, we can be sure that right now ants are not asking themselves these questions whenever any phenomenon happens in their lives, caused by humans, such as sweeping with a broom, or by nature, such as rain.

WHAT IS THE POINT OF SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL life? It is the quest of knowledge, the curiosity that moves our civilizations; the spirit of discovery that seems to be built in into our genes. Ever since hominids appeared on Earth almost three million years ago, they have been in a constant struggle to survive, to use nature, to understand their environment, to learn, to invent, to create. Not all of this has been positive. Ambition, poverty, greed, stupidity, all have contributed as well to our permanent state of conflict; and our permanent search for peace. But a desire to establish order, to live comfortably, to respect and be respected has also been part of this quest. And the exploration of the mind and by the mind has been a significant characteristic of our species.

Maybe, when the awkward encounter with the extraterrestrials arrives, the feeling “will be of two civilizations facing each other, wanting to do something together but not ready to initiate it”. And then, perhaps, the true meaning of Mamilahpinatapai will finally become clear to us all.