Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice

“And what is this ’other language’ like?”

“I can convey that to you only in a general way. Let me simplify. Organisms, in evolution, ’communicate’ by ’uttering’ certain sentences, which are genotypes, and the ’words’ in them correspond to the chromosomes. But when a scientist presents to you the structural model of a genotype, you are no longer dealing with an ’acultural code,’ because the scientist has translated the code of genetics into the language of symbols — chemical symbols, let us say. Now, to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ’acultural language’ is something more or less like Kant’s ’thing-in-itself.’ One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing. What comes from the culture and what comes from ’nature’ — or from ’the world itself’ —appear, when we examine any utterance whatsoever, as a two-component ’mixture.’ In the language of the Merovingians, or in the political slogans of the Republican Party, the percentage of the ’culture’ ingredient is very high, and what does not depend on culture — the ingredient ’straight from the world’ — is present only in small quantities. In the language used by physics, we have, you could say, the opposite: there is much of ’what is natural,’ of what comes from ’nature itself,’ and little of what has been shaped by culture. But a state of complete ’acultural’ purity in principle cannot be achieved. The idea that, in sending to another civilization an envelope containing models of atoms, it would be possible to eradicate from such a letter all traces of culture — that idea is based on an illusion. The trace can be greatly reduced, but no one, not in the entire Cosmos, is or ever will be able to reduce it to zero.”

“The letter is written in an ’acultural’ language, but still possesses an element of the culture of the Senders. Is that right? Is this where the difficulty lies?”

“Where one of the difficulties lies. The Senders differ from us both in culture and in knowledge, and let us call that knowledge scientific. For this reason the difficulty is at least two-level. We cannot divine their culture — not now, and not, I believe, in a thousand years. They must know this perfectly well. Therefore they have sent the sort of information for whose deciphering no knowledge of their culture is required. That is almost definite.”

“And so the cultural factor should present no obstacle?”

“Senator, we do not even know what is presenting the obstacle to us. We have evaluated the entire letter with respect to its complexity. The complexity is such that it corresponds roughly to a class of systems known to us — social and biological. We have no theory of social systems, thus we were forced to use, as models ’placed against’ the letter, genotypes — or, rather, not the genotypes themselves, but the mathematical apparatus employed in the study of them. We learned that an object even more similar to the code is a living cell — or a whole living organism. From which it does not follow that the letter is actually a kind of genotype, but only that out of all the things known to us which, for comparison, we ’set against’ the code, the genotype is the most helpful. Do you see the tremendous risk this carries with it?”

“Not exactly. It would seem that the only risk is that if the code is not, after all, a genotype, then your deciphering will not succeed. There is more?”

“We are proceeding like a man who looks for a lost thing not everywhere, but only beneath a lighted street lamp, because there it is bright. Have you ever seen a tape for an automatic piano — a player piano?”

“Of course. It comes in a roll, with perforations.”

“By chance, a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano, and although the program has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with music — it might refer to some fifth-order equation — nevertheless, when it is put in the machine, it produces notes. And it might also happen that not all the notes thus produced will be in total chaos, but that here and there one will hear some musical phrase. Can you guess why I use this example?”

“I think I can. You believe that Frog Eggs is a ’musical phrase’ caused by inserting in a player piano a tape that really belongs in a digital machine?”

“Yes. That is exactly what I believe. One who puts a digital tape in a player piano is making a mistake, and it is entirely possible that we have taken precisely such a mistake for success.”

“Yes, but your two research teams, wholly independently of each other, produced Frog Eggs and Lord of the Flies — one and the same substance!”

“If you have a player piano in your house, and are unaware of the existence of digital computers, and the same is true of your neighbor, then, if you find some tape from a digital computer, it is very probable that both of you will do the same — you will conclude that the tape is meant for the player piano, because you possess no knowledge of other possibilities.”

“I understand. This is, then, your hypothesis?”

“This is my hypothesis.”

“You spoke of a tremendous risk. Where is it?”

“Substituting a computer tape for a player piano tape does not, obviously, involve risk; it is a harmless misunderstanding. But in our case it could be otherwise, and the consequences of a mistake could prove incalculable.”

“How so?”

“I do not know. What I have in mind is the kind of error whereby someone reads, in a kitchen recipe, the word ’amanita’ instead of ’amandine,’ and concocts a dish that sends all his guests to their graves. Please keep in mind that we have done what lay within our power to do, and so imposed our knowledge — our perhaps simplified or erroneous notions — on the code.”

McMahon asked how this was possible if it was so very like the breaking of a cipher. He had seen Lord of the Flies. Could one decipher a code incorrectly and still obtain such astounding results? Could the fragment of the translation that was Lord of the Flies be completely false?

“It is possible,” I replied. “If we were to send, telegraphically, the genotype of a man, and the receiver were able to synthesize, on the basis of that, only white blood cells, he would end up with amoebalike things as well as an enormous amount of unused information. One cannot say that he who produces corpuscles, having before him the human genotype, has read the message correctly.”

“The difference is on that order?”

“Yes. We made use of two to four percent of the entire code; but that is not all, because within that small percent there could be a full third that is guesswork: i.e., all that we ourselves put into the translation, from our knowledge of stereochemistry, physics, and so on. If the genotype of man were read to a similarly low degree, one could not even construct white blood cells. At the most, something in the nature of a lifeless protein suspension — nothing more. I think, incidentally, that conducting precisely such experiments with the human genotype — which already has been deciphered to about seventy percent — would be extremely instructive for us; but we cannot do this, because we have neither the time nor the resources.”

When he asked me what I thought was the difference in development that separated us from the Senders, I said that although the statistics of von Hoerner and Brace indicated that the highest probability was for a first encounter to be with a civilization having an age of about twelve thousand years, I believed that there was a real possibility that the Senders were as much as a billion years old. Otherwise, the transmitting of a “life-causing” signal would not have any rational justification, since it could produce no effect in the course of a mere millennium.