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Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
- edem 10y agoPlease don't post spoilers. I haven't seen the movie yet.
- ceterum_censeo 10y agoA valid concern. The very first line: This post is about the movie Arrival; there are no movie spoilers here.
- edem 10y agoI did not open the link to see no spoilers.
- jasonmp85 10y ago"Quick"?
- thret 10y ago"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.
- disssonant 10y agoOh, 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 10y agoTo 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 10y agoThe 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.
- mattivc 10y agoI think you misunderstood a bit. The circular symbol is not correlated to the landing sites in any way. It's just a example of the alien's writing system, which large parts of the movie centers around deciphering. It's a pretty good movie, i can recommend watching it.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien spaceships A (unfortunately) deleted scene explains this; our computers are based on reverse-engineered alien technology. We're both effectively running the same architecture.
- theoh 10y agoHmm, architecture can mean two things: general structure (e.g. Harvard, Von Neumann etc.) or specific machine type (i386, ARM4). It's plausible that we would have the same architecture in the first sense but not in the second (where we have seen great diversity and evolution).
- adriand 10y agoInteresting 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 10y agoI 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.
- ntelson1s 10y agoJust saw it today. Number 2 is the reason.
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- joering2 10y agoNot necessarily. We sent man to the moon but can we communicate with Ants?
- simonh 10y ago
- extr 10y agoIf 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
- schoen 10y agoI had read the story before and I saw the movie this evening. I wrote to a friend that it's about 25% Ted Chiang and about 75% Hollywood (with some very significant changes, though a similar central theme). I guess discussing the differences makes for a huge spoiler. Perhaps I can say that the movie has a major plot about military conflicts (obgu orgjrra uhznaf naq urcgncbqf, naq orgjrra uhzna angvbaf) that's absent from the original story. Also, in the movie we learn jul gur urcgncbqf ivfvgrq Rnegu, whereas in the story guvf erznvaf n pbzcyrgr zlfgrel. In the story Louise ersyrpgf n terng qrny ba jung vg zrnaf gb xabj gur shgher naq ubj guvf vagrenpgf jvgu serr jvyy, while in the movie this isn't really depicted at all, except sbe gur prageny cybg nobhg xabjvat gur sngr bs ure zneevntr naq ure qnhtugre nurnq bs gvzr.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoFor the lazy: http://www.rot13.com/ http://www.rot13.com/ :)
- jimmcslim 10y agoFor a story that's about yvathvfgvpf, that was irel pyrire!
- andrewflnr 10y agoThat's an ass-kicker of a story. Chiang is awesome.
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- ThePhysicist 10y agoIt'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.
- kybernetyk 10y agoI'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.
- icebraining 10y agoWhy not? We can build space ships (technically, even interstellar ones - they'll eventually get there!) and we barely understand some of our own languages.
- BHSPitMonkey 10y agoThat might follow if our use of language were always purely logical; my experience is that this is often not the case.
- johnchristopher 10y agoFollowing 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 10y agoI 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.
- venomsnake 10y agoHonest question - how fast can we train AI to know language?
- daveguy 10y ago
- Luc 10y agoWhat'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 10y agoIt'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 10y agoOn stackexchange the idea of a graviton laser has already been discussed: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170215/in-theory-could-gravitational-waves-be-used-to-make-a-gravity-laser https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170215/in-theory...
- spiraldancing 10y ago1) 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.
- eip 10y agoInteresting 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