Artists and Scientists to Gather in Paris, Composing Messages to ET.

by Douglas Vakoch - Social Scientist / Principal Investigator

What happens when some of the leading SETI scientists, space artists, and distinguished scholars gather in the outskirts of Paris to plan a reply to ET?  On March 18, 2002, the SETI Institute will sponsor a Workshop on the Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition to find out.

With nearly twenty artists, scientists, and other scholars from America and Europe presenting their ideas at the Workshop, its impossible in a brief article to do justice to the range of topics that will be discussed.  Readers wanting more detail can consult the Workshops web pages. Nevertheless, by looking at the contributions of a few of the participants of the Paris Workshop, we might get some clues about how we can bridge the gap between Earths Two Culturesthe sciences and the humanitiesand in the process come a bit closer to understanding ET.

One of the featured artists at the Workshop, Steve Deihl, has long worked to depict physical constants in his drawings.  For example, his constants series describes mathematical and physical constants, mixing numerical description with pictures of his design.  In this series of prints, Deihls image entitled e depicts the base of natural logarithmsa concept familiar to any first year calculus student, and also reflected in the structure of the world around us.

According to Deihl, e is found to occur naturally in spirals whose forms are self-similar and geometrically compound upon themselves, exactly as interest does in banking.  While e can be approximated by the number 2.718 , what would it look like in a picture?  Deihl suggests that artists can get inspiration for such depictions by natural manifestations of e, apparent in the shape of such seemingly disparate things as sunflowers, the nautilus shell, and galactic spirals.

At the Paris Workshop, Deihl will extend his notions about universal physical constants that are also laden with aesthetic qualities as he discusses his new Rainbow Project.  When white light is passed through a prismor in nature, through droplets of water suspended in the atmosphereit is dispersed into the colors of the spectrum.  The result is an image symbolized throughout Earth, reflecting such different meanings as the power of hope and the value of diversity. 

Artwork by Steve Deihl from the 'constants' portfolio.

Deihl suggests that extraterrestrials who are savvy about basic optics should also be familiar with the rainbow.  And while one might depict the rainbow numerically or through visual images, as he did in his constants series, he suggests a radically different approach designed for technologies currently used in SETI.  Rather than depicting a rainbow with pencil and paper, he suggests transmitting at radio frequencies that are physically related to the frequencies of colors in the spectrum.  Using this approach, even extraterrestrials who dont navigate through their environments courtesy of vision might gain clues to how humans literally see the world.

Sierpinski Gasket: This fractal is constructed by starting with an triangle having all sides of equal length. In the middle of this triangle, a smaller triangle is cut out, leaving three other triangles at the corners of the original triangle. This process can be repeated over and over, without end. The result is a mathematically elegant figure that can be expressed very simply in computer code.

Another participant of the Paris Workshop, physicist Lui Lam, suggests that any extraterrestrial capable of interstellar communication will likely be familiar with fundamental notions of complexity.  In Lams view, Like us, being a complex system, an ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] will recognize immediately the property of self-similarity, the principle behind fractals, which exist ubiquitously over many scales on Earth and anywhere else in the universe. 

As an example, Lam describes a very simple fractal: the Sierpinski Gasket. This fractal is constructed by starting with an triangle having all sides of equal length.  In the middle of this triangle, a smaller triangle is cut out, leaving three other triangles at the corners of the original triangle.  This process can be repeated over and over, without end.  The result is a mathematically elegant figure that can be expressed very simply in computer code. 

The Sierpinski Gasket also shows the connection between art and mathematics.  A survey of European art, for example, shows many designs very similar to this fractal.  Might a simple mathematic description of a repeating series such as the Sierpinski Gasket give ET a clue to some of our notions of beauty?  If aliens share the taste of certain early Italian artists, the answer may be yes.

As highly visual creatures, it may be natural for humans to think of the connection between art and mathematics in pictorial terms.  Another alternative to be discussed at the Paris Workshop, however, is music.  Even in ancient Greece, Pythagorean philosophers expounded on the mathematical nature of music.  In Paris, the Dutch astronomer and computer scientist Alexander Ollongren will bring the discussion to the present, and possibly into the future, as he suggests a method for communicating music through interstellar messages. 

Ollongrens work is an extension of the late Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthals interstellar language, named Lingua Cosmica, or Lincos for short.  Using the presumably universal language of mathematics and logic, Ollongren will help nudge participants away from the largely American and European involvement with SETI, bringing in another perspective by illustrating his proposal with music from an Indonesian Gamelan orchestra.  Though Ollongren has lived and worked much of his life in the Netherlands, he was raised in Indonesia, and he and his wife began playing in a Gamelan orchestra for several years in the mid-1980s.  In Paris, he will illustrate his coding scheme with musical selections played by him and his wife. 

The domestic tone of Ollongrens music will be consonant with the atmosphere of the Workshop.  Roger Malina, Chairman of the Board of one of the Workshops other sponsors, Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, describes the setting of the Workshop.  To be held in a private residence in the Paris suburb of Boulogne Billancourt, Malina anticipates that the Workshop will provide an intimate family setting that encourages excellent discussions and productive work.  Because of space limitations, the Workshop will be closed to the public, and there will be very limited room for the press, by invitation only.

This one-day Workshop is the second in a series of Workshops on interstellar message composition being organized by the SETI Institute.  The first of these meetings was organized by the SETI Institute last autumn in Toulouse, France, and will be summarized in Paris by one of the Workshop participants, Italian philosopher of science Paolo Musso.