Lost in the Cosmos

that the responses received were not acknowledgments or statements of information but were rather countersignals of one sort or another, responses which seemed to express something like excitement or alarm or anger, often actual movements of the organisms themselves. Thus, rather than information being obtained, various behaviors were encountered—hostile, aversive, coming close or going away, flight or fight, and in one case what appeared to be an attempt at sexual union.
    In fact, two such creatures were encountered in the solar system.
    (1) In the outer atmosphere of Jupiter, large gaseous clouds were sighted. It was determined that they were self-contained organisms of some intelligence because they were self-propelled, moving about by emitting jets of hydrogen. They injested organic molecules and excreted helium and methane, and were observed to reproduce by fission. But despite every effort to communicate, e.g., by transmitting prime numbers in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, the only response of the clouds was to speed away or come close and surround the ship like a sportive school of whales—or to rise and sink like so many hot-air balloons.
    (2) Skirting Saturn’s moon Titan with its heavy atmosphere of methane, another sort of creature was encountered, small glittering anemone-like organisms with spicules of methane crystals and a beak-and-sucker mouth for devouring the brown sludge of organic molecules formed on Titan’s surface by the ultraviolet light of the sun. Upon the transmission of radio waves of the frequency 1420 megahertz, the creatures were thrown into violent excitement, for all the world like the behavior of male gypsy moths upon the reception of the female pheromone. They flocked to the ship and attached themselves to its tiles and windows, using their sucker-like mouths. It was not clear whether such a response was a manifestation of hunger or hostility or an attempt at sexual union.
    At last, five years later, near Proxima Centauri, communication was established with an extraterrestrial intelligence. Orbiting the third planet of Proxima Centauri (PC3), of PC’s twelve planets the one most resembling Earth, the earthship transmitted the prime numbers in the radio range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Almost immediately, the signal was returned—and imitated. But when the excited earthlings tried to descend, a glitch occurred in the controls, not once, but repeatedly—until it finally dawned on the crew that they were being held in orbit. Evidently, the earthship was being detained at a kind of checkpoint until its credentials were approved.
    It was necessary to hit upon a mathematical and semantic vocabulary. The former was easy, again using the physical properties of the hydrogen atom, assigning the binary number 1 to the transition between the parallel and antiparallel proton and electron spins of the neutral hydrogen atom. Such a transition emits a radio-frequency photon of wavelength 21 centimeters and a frequency of 1420 megahertz—the reason for selecting this channel of transmission. An indexical lexicon was agreed upon. Thus, certain binary numbers were assigned to the suns of Centauri by transmitting the number along with the angle or declination of the suns from the path of transmission. Similarly, other names were assigned to other features, the other referents being “pointed at” and “named,” e.g., light, dark, other planets, pulsars, big, little, red, blue, near, far, down, up, here, there, I (the earthship), you (PC3), and so on. Plurals and abstractions and tenses were agreed upon. Goodness was a property attributed to cosmic particles which were beneficial to the metabolism of the PC3 organisms, evil to the ultraviolet rays, which were harmful. Even metaphor was arrived at: I am M4 today, meaning I am your fourth moon, PC3's fourth moon being bright, small, racy, refractile as a diamond. Or I am M6 —sluggish, blue, misshapen, bored. Consciousness was defined as that property of a creature by which he draws attention to something, talks about it, or thinks about it. It was designated by a binary number which we shall call C.
    A lexicon and syntax agreed upon, it was now possible for the earthship to transmit basic information about its origin, its sun, the geology, atmosphere, age of the planet earth, the biology of its organisms (e.g., C, H, O, S, H 2 O, PO 4 ; deoxyribonucleic acid; mobile heterotrophs; surface dwellers; O 2 breathers;