
Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? - xenophonf
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-spacecraft-work/
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extr
If anyone hasn't read the short story that Arrival is based on, definitely
check it out, it's called "Story of Your Life". Ted Chiang is a fantastic
SciFi writer and I was very excited (worried?) that this particular story was
chosen for a film adaption, as it doesn't seem to lend itself well to the
medium. But based on early feedback I'm optimistic.

Not sure how closely the movie follows the short story's plot, but obviously
spoilers could be involved, so fair warning. Here is a PDF version of the
story:
[http://cfile203.uf.daum.net/attach/254E884754DC52CB277F4F](http://cfile203.uf.daum.net/attach/254E884754DC52CB277F4F)

~~~
crdb
I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and
arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing.

The craftsmanship is _good_ , although not _great_ (the split structure feels
a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad.

The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the
same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates
_great_ craftsmanship.

Despite being raised atheist, I remember reading a novelised story of Jesus'
life as a teenager where Joseph told a young Jesus that no cross was ever
built well because great craftsmen refused to build instruments of death. I
thought of this passage whilst reading Ubik and I think of it with Story of My
Life.

I'll add to these two the otherwise pretty good Hyperion Cantos, for its
ending, although I think the author did paint himself in a corner there. Some
series are better left unfinished...

~~~
david-given
Ooh, I have a treat for you!

Peter Watts, known in the science fiction world as 'The Antidote for
Optimism', has some of his novels online. I would strongly recommend his
multiple award winning _Blindsight_ :

[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

...because it's _fascinating_ first contact novel; crazy, well researched,
aliens that are genuinely alien, and not quite as bleak as his other books.
(Still quite bleak.) There's a sequel, _Echopraxia_ , that is also awesome,
and will introduce you to Portia Labiata, the most intelligent spider in the
world.

Also, space vampires.

~~~
crdb
I was going to say two recent great first contact novels (showing you can
still, in our era, do first contact in an original and intelligent manner) are
Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy and Peter Watts' work. I also think many of
Charlie Stross' novels fit in there. For example, what they find on the other
side of the wormhole modem in Accelerando counts as a "first contact" of
sorts... and it is definitely original.

Clearly we're on the same page. Any other recommendations?

~~~
mos_basik
>Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy

Man... I've been trying to get started on it for months! My eye was caught by
it at random in the "New" section of my local library, and then the jacket
held me when it said (paraphrased) that it had basically won every Chinese SF
award there is. The book was the 2nd of the series, though, and the 1st was
checked out...

It's been completely checked out every time I've been in a library since then,
and I've been to three different ones.

I guess it must be good? Your mention of it only adds fuel to the fire. At
some point I'll be intentional enough about it enough to place a hold or buy
them, I guess.

~~~
crdb
I think, on its own, that the story holds up to being "worth reading". The
Dark Forest solution to the Fermi paradox is elegant and I was surprised (from
cursory research) that Liu seems to be the first to come up with it.

However the real value in the book for me was twofold: first, some insight
into the way PRC folks think (some mistake it for a bad translation or
criticise the way the characters are thinking as "unrealistic" \- I would say
instead it's often very Chinese); second, this is one of few books depicting
information warfare.

On the first I have not much more to say. I've lived in Asia for a while so I
recognise some patterns, but I don't speak Mandarin. My understanding of PRC
folks is purely based on my interaction with my friends there. Nevertheless
based on this I would say that a lot of the ways in which the characters'
thinking differs from that of say, those in a Vernon Vinge novel are typically
Chinese. In the same vein there is the hilarious dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao
although it's hard to pick up a subtitled version (it airs on one of the
Australian channels occasionally).

Information warfare is rarely discussed intelligently here for some reason
(probably because it is used systematically by a variety of groups that
frequent HN and try to minimise its existence and impact, because "those who
know stay quiet" and because it is easier to defend from manipulation if the
manipulator does not understand you well).

In Liu's books, particularly the first and a little bit in Death's End, it
consists of modifying the culture of the enemy so that it is more easily
defeated. This is an art as old as humanity; the first formal reference to it
in the modern era might be the Potemkin village, and a good introductory book
on the Soviet flavour ("Active Measures") is Gen. Oleg Kalugin's biography [1]
published after he defected. If you speak French, both books by the anonymous
"Lt Col X" [2] (most likely to be a French intelligence officer) are also
worth a read.

Taken together with the fact that the book was very successful in China (which
is impossible without at least tacit government approval), it presents a
possible explanation for the Great Firewall.

In the book, a key plot point is that everything you do is known instantly by
the enemy - just like the NSA was shown to be able to do by Snowden. Thus,
humans need to learn to hide their actions, letting just enough information
leak to other humans for coordination but without tipping their hand to the
very smart, omniscient, but less able to lie Trisolarians. Considering the
Chinese have a reputation for speaking in parables ("riddle, wrapped in a
mystery, inside an enigma" \- applicable to the Russians originally but I
heard it many times applied to the PRC) there is a direct parallel with a
facet of how the authorities and some of the population might view the current
top superpower.

In short I guarantee it will be unlike anything you've read this year.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-
Esp...](https://www.amazon.com/Spymaster-Thirty-two-Intelligence-Espionage-
Against/dp/0465014453)

[2] [http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-
speciales-...](http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-methodes-techniques-speciales-
services/dp/1482745518/) \- [https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-
manipulation-2e-revue-au...](https://www.amazon.fr/Manuel-contre-
manipulation-2e-revue-augmentee/dp/1505427800/)

~~~
mos_basik
Wow, thank you! I appreciate that you took the time to go into some detail. It
sounds exactly up my alley.

>modifying the culture of the enemy so it is more easily defeated

>everything you do is known instantly by the enemy

Good stuff! Also, this is tickling my brain so hard; I feel like I've read one
or two books or short stories that play with the second concept with very
effective results, but I can't remember what they were. The later books in the
Ender's Game series? Something by Neal Stephenson? Heinlen's The Moon is a
Harsh Mistress? In any case, I look forward to Liu's take on it.

I do speak French, as luck would have it, so thanks for those recommendations,
too. This sub-thread has mentioned several books that I haven't read but look
_very_ interesting. What a gold mine!

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adriand
Interesting post. But I wonder if the focus on how we would communicate with
aliens makes sense. In the case of this movie, they arrived here, apparently.
If they're that much more technologically advanced than we are, wouldn't they
be taking the lead on communicating with us? They'd probably have a
substantial set of templates for how to communicate with primitive
civilizations developed already.

~~~
kijin
I haven't watched the movie, but there are some possible explanations for the
discrepancy you mention:

1\. Perhaps all the other civilizations they've met so far communicate in a
certain way (e.g. telepathy), and humans are the first intelligent species
they've encountered that has the pesky requirement of audiovisual clues.
They're just as busy trying to figure out how to talk to us as we are, but
they're much more patient.

2\. Perhaps their preferred method of space exploration and conquest is to
wait until the indigenous species figures out how to communicate with them.
Only then will they accept the indigenous species as worthy of participating
in the Galactic Republic or whatever. If they wait a certain amount of time
and we still can't talk to them, they'll either abandon us, exterminate us, or
try again in another million years.

3\. Perhaps their ship is in distress and stranded on Earth, with their
Universal Translator broken and the aliens all cooped up in one room that
still contains their atmosphere.

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spiraldancing
1) I have seen the movie, and read the post, and his opening claim that "there
aren't any spoilers", is kind of not true. While there aren't any explicit,
blatant spoilers, he does kind of rub up against the plot a lot, in a way that
gives a lot of hints that people might not want to know, before seeing it.

2) Was no one else bothered by his "Pioneer" faux pas? He's obviously
extremely advanced, scientifically -- light years beyond my level -- and yet,
he erroneously states that Pioneer 10 is the furthest human object in
interstellar space ... which stopped being true when Voyager 1 passed it back
in the 1990s ... and, strictly speaking, Pioneer hasn't even reached
interstellar space, yet.

I know it shouldn't bother me as much as it does ... but of all the science he
talks about in this post, this is the one thing I know about -- and he got it
wrong, so now I have doubts about everything else he said.

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ThePhysicist
It's interesting (and funny) that Stephen always finds a way to use cellular
automata to solve a problem. Really intrigued by the septapod handwriting
though, alien writing systems tend to be one of the more interesting aspects
of alien culture created for movies.

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kybernetyk
I't funny that so many people assume intelligent beings who build space ships
capable of interstellar travel would need our help with understanding human
language.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
That might follow if our use of language were always purely logical; my
experience is that this is often not the case.

~~~
johnchristopher
Following up on a conversation I had with my grandmother this morning when she
used a denomination that hasn't been heard nor read for more than a century
and which led to a dictionary war with me leaving the house in rage against
know-it-all old people who can't use everyday word for everyday thing but must
conjure up baroque and archaic terms for common household appliance and tell
you "only you doesn't know that"... good luck to the aliens.

~~~
macintux
I had to regularly ask my great-aunt when she'd use the construction "quarter
of 12" whether she meant 11:45 or 12:15.

Language is bloody hard.

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disssonant
Oh, but the polygonal "analysis" overlayed on that circular splotch with the
drip marks as an alien's "handwriting" example is corny beyond words.

Correlating an arbitrary set of points on splashy drippy smears, and eureka!
It's a symbol for the global landing sites across seven continents?

Yeah right. That leap in counter-intuitive conceptualization is on the level
of bat shark repellant, or Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien
spaceships, as used by Wil Smith and Jeff Goldblum.

Those ink spatters look like droplets sprayed by an airbrush, with no control
exerted, leaving a disorganized sprawl of drip marks. Why the clustered focus
of points in one area over another?

Cognitive dissonance and hand wavey science. But movies are movies.

~~~
crooked-v
To me, the intent in the movie was pretty obvious: specific polygonal clusters
attached to the circle act something like radicals in kanji, but with even
more components that can be built into a single 'word'.

Your complaint strikes me like complaining that kanji calligraphy (for
example: [https://i.imgur.com/wHdqJIF.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/wHdqJIF.jpg))
obviously can't mean anything because it's just splashy ink marks.

~~~
kijin
The circle reminds me of consistent hashing. The most popular method is to
make a circle and place nodes at different points along the circumference.

A circle is an elegant way to encapsulate a lot of information in a compact
symbol. These aliens could be really good at detecting angles. If their eyes
have cones polarized at different angles, shapes placed at different points on
the circle could appear to be written in different colors to them. That would
be just as natural as words written in a line are to us. Fascinating stuff.

------
Luc
What's going on with all these ROT13 comments? I've never seen that before. Is
this a bit of culture carrying over from another website or something?

~~~
xenophonf
It's how one posted spoilers in the beforetime. (I'm not sure if HN has a
special spoiler markup like you get on Reddit or similar.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13)

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amai
On stackexchange the idea of a graviton laser has already been discussed:
[https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170215/in-
theory...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170215/in-theory-could-
gravitational-waves-be-used-to-make-a-gravity-laser)

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edem
Please don't post spoilers. I haven't seen the movie yet.

~~~
ceterum_censeo
A valid concern. The very first line: _This post is about the movie Arrival;
there are no movie spoilers here._

~~~
edem
I did not open the link to see no spoilers.

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jasonmp85
"Quick"?

~~~
thret
"Unfortunately there wasn’t much time—and in the end I basically had just one
evening to invent how interstellar space travel might work." And he comes up
with two completely different theories each of which is not impossible.

------
eip
Interesting explanation of how one type of alien craft work:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_aAVU5Fv5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_aAVU5Fv5c)

