Ender’s Game is about a misunderstanding.
I know, I know. The story is about a terrible war and child soldiers and morality and all that. But at the core of the movie, which opens this weekend, and the book it’s based on is the failure to understand an alien species. Not to be too spoilery, but it is this basic confusion that fuels the conflict between humans and the alien civilization known as the Formics. And this inability to comprehend another intelligent species might be closer to the truth than is generally thought.
In most popular works of science fiction, communicating with extraterrestrials is one of the easiest things ever. There is some perfect translator technology, an excellent grasp of alien languages, or some hilarious coincidence that allows humans to talk to other intelligent species in the universe. This makes sense. It would be a pretty boring plot line if aliens came down to Earth, went “Blorg krazap” and then we spent 500 years trying to decipher that.
But a lot of the earliest scientific thinking on communicating with aliens, much of it from researchers working with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), has also thought it would be relatively trivial. They beam us some prime numbers, we respond, and bam, you’ve got a direct link.
“For a long time in the SETI community, there was an assumption that science and math are naturally universal and we’d use them as some sort of cosmic Rosetta Stone,” said psychologist Douglas Vakoch, who works on interstellar message composition at SETI. “But over the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been an increasing awareness of how challenging it will be to communicate.”
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