New Britain Herald Newspaper, March 3, 1919, Page 10

intelligence : of us ear(N-dwellers, means at their comthand to recy and answer these messages. Why not? Some people deny the possibility &t They it to b counter to religlon to hold that there than such a thing. declare are other habitable worl earth. They called this entire universe contend that the Creator into being for no other purpose than to afford man an opportunity to practice vir- a view can find a modern is at- tested by the fact that at least ome fairly good-sized book to that effect has been published quite recently. The Speed of Light Can anything be more absurd or better calculated to slander Him whose majesty and omnipotence such treat- tue. That such lodgment in a brain ises profess to hold in especial rever- ence? What is there about man that he should feel entitled to consider him- self so precious a paragon as to merit the creation of worlds trillions of mileg away to serve as to draw him, by their sublime spec- more edifying a sort of lure tacle at night, into a course of conduct? Yet th 4s one of the arguments urged by those who, although there is nothing in re- eriously, vealed religion to warrant it, declare 4t irreligious to even imagine that other orbs than the earth are inhab- fted or that communication may be established with them. Man a paragon, forscoth! of the war we have just been through is too recent to justify so crass a self- dslusion. Moreover, are there not Memory daily enacted all around us such acts of injustice that, if the sun had really been created for no other purpose than to purge man of his iniquity. it might well wish to veil its face in shame? Do the Pleiades shine in the skies to furnish evening’s spectacle back- forth an to a race to which thefts, frauds bitings, class and hourl robberies, hypoeris! race hatreds and murders are of occurrence? The saying is an- cient that “man is a woll to man.” No other for the pleasur animal kills, as does man, of the killing, for the sport of it. Even tigers slay only for food or anger; fear or And believe that it when they are, in 1lone, a pastime. man yet, we are a erse was when was for him that created and will ccase to be the r: of ragon is run. Let this mighty around at fabric, world, it. The earth not? us just take a look the and looks 1 we ight through its try to measure pretty ma could dig a does it this hole bat2o i . And ts surface miles. would take an a good many days to ray of light eight times center to the opposite side, would to go aro he ez n would b " Needless express train maike that distance. A can travel it ne within a second. 24,600 RELESS TO DISTANT STARS Whlfe Ledzer Co. NIKOLA TESLA Is the day at hand when communication with dwellers of stars trillions of miles beyond the solar system is to be established? Light and electricity travel at the same rate of spced. this at 185,000 Fast place miles a nd. uld take a ray out from the earth to get to the 93,000,000 Seient rate as this is, it wi of light sent ecight sun; for the sun miles away, Going around the sun in a sort of majestic minuet-like dance are eight planets, of which the earth is one. In the order of their sequence and ap- proximate distances from the sun these planets are: Mercury, 36,000,000 miles from the sun; Venus, 67,000,000 miles; Earth, 93,000,000 miles; Mars, 141,000,000 miles; Jupiter, 484,000,000 miles; Saturn, $87,000,000 miles; Uranus, 1,800,000,000 miles, and Nep- tune, 2.800,000,000 miles. about minutes is about A Message to Neptune sage sent from the the planet Nep- A wire m earth would reach tune in the same length of time as would be required by a ray of light, that is to say, in about six hours; hav- ing in the meantime also touched at the intervening planets. According to the latest theory of astronomers, based upon the disclosures of astrophysics, the atmospheric and other conditions of the fellow-planets of the earth are not faverable for animal life; and it likely that any or- nized creatures which might bos- sibly dwell there poss a sufflcient degree of intelligence to have devel. oped the means of receiving or trans- mitting any such message: If any do dwell there, so much the better; if therefore is not not, the waves carrying the message would interminable flight through until they reached the shores of planets in other solar systems and there, perhaps, find instruments attuned for their recep- tion. Going tem, the continue their space, outside our own solar SV nearest sun to us is Alpha Centauri. Its distance from us is so prodigious that. although it travels through space at an almost incredible speed, its position in the heavens ap- pears to shift I than a foot in 200 year: As light travels at the rate of nearly six trillion miles a year and, according to astronomers, it takes a ray of light more than eight vears to reach us from Alpha Centauri. the latter’s distance from us is eight times six trillion miles; that is to say, about forty-eight trillion miles, which when expressed in numerals looks like this: 48,000,000,000,000 miles. Sirius, the brightest star in the heav our next necarest neighbor, re- quires ten years to send a ray of light to us As forth his ten years this time, by dwellers doubtedly co auri and Signor Marconi says he sent radio-mes: received un Ipha have been planets W around both A , and that an e on the way and ma rth in six years, from t tar; in ten years from the more remote one (Sirius) If no signal comes to us Wwithin that time, the outlook for ever ceiving one will be extremely prob- they hich lematical. T distant stars are the generation would long have answer could mil thore away that sending a message vassed away bhefore the be received. Indeed, most of the with which the heavens studded which constitute is known as the Milky Way 10,000 years for a ray radio message from us clusters of removed lions of sta are and what would require of light or a to reach them:; and othel are 50,000 light-years pressed in spatial figures, uttered 50,000 light- 2 284,800,000,000,000 two hun- irillion, two trillion, eight tars from us. B this so glibly years would be miles, which i dred and nine hundred and e hundred billion miles. However, assuming that 1pha Cen- Sirius does possess a planet having inhabitants the intelli- nce and culture they should have instruments for receiving radio messages— with them pronounc: liree qt -four tauri or situated like ours: stage of that at about ang transmitting communication and how be established? My, Tesla is auoted as saying: “The problem of con ihrough space knowledge of form has occupied me found a solution; the unde- could eving for years and I hav but my veloped, Signor gard to was still in ital state.” itement communi idea xper Marconi's the mode of follows Mathematical Message “It (the necessary erence in lan- guage) is an obstacle; but I don’t think it is i rmountable. You see, one might get through some such mes- sage as ‘two plus two equals four,’ and go on until an answer came signifying ‘yes’ which would be one word. Mathematics must be the same throughout the phys- By sticking to mathe- number of years one certainly repeating it back ical universe. matics over might come to speech. It possible.” As every inadequate system of sig- naling to the stars necessarily in- volves a loss of from sixteen to twen- ty years' time, it is most desirable, of course, that at the very outset a method of communication be chosen which would make it almost impossi- for intellizent being addressed to mis hard to see how space knowledge of Mr. Tesla speaks, is possible, espe- cially where such almost incompre- hensible distances are concerned. der conveving through form,” of which Signor Marconi's suggestion appears to be more feasible, aithough the for- mula he has adopted to illustrate it— “two plus four"—is not an altogether felicitous one. Put before a college of Chinese who, we will as- sume, have never seen a written line or heard a spoken of English; and the chances are they might pore over it a hundred years without guess- ing its meaning. Nevertheless, it is mathematics—the most slementary branch of it, arithme- tie—which is probabiy t.> sole hope > of ever establishing commu- with distant orbs. The rea- son for this is that arithmetic has a direct relation to time, which is the simplest and most indispensable chan- nel of our percentions. two equals that sentence savants, word we nication Time is the indispensable mold, if one may so express himself, through which objects, emotions or even thoughts must pass before an or. ganized nse-endowed being can by any possibility perceive or be con- scious of them. Time is as much a constituent part of the mechanism of perception as is the turning of the reel of the cinematograph in the suc- cessive unfolding of the motion-picture film Arithmetic is based exclusively upon this time-sense within Any num- ber we can think of is but so many “times" one. Tor the perception of actual forms, the other hand, space is required, in addition to time. Thus, while the sole essential mold through which our thoughts and feelings and our arithmetical sense must pass has an analogy to the turning of the cinema reel, space is the mold which bears an analogy to the screen upon which the motion picture is cast before it becomes perceptible. And this added requisite, naturally, complicates the process of perception and renders so much more difficult attempt to convey this class of perceptions over vast distances by such tenuous as wireless telegraphy. time with the ts of the motion picture recalls the interesting fact the profoundest of the {hinkers of ancient Greece, speaks of time as “the moving picture of eter- us. on any such The comparison of line >lato, Universal Time-Sense Arithmetic, then, is what must be orted to for establishing communi- cation with distant orbs; for no mat- ter how the living organized beings anywhere are constructed, no matter what their shape may be, if they havo any means of perception at all, they must possess at least the time-sense upon have just seen, arithm For without this time-sense it absolutely incon- ccivable how there could any sense-perception at all. In this view of the matter, the fol- lowing mode of procedure is respect- fully submitted, in case scientists actu- ally in all seriousness intend to make an effort to get into touch with the which, as we s based. be stars. Let a dot stand for one, two dots for two, three dots for three and so forth up to ten. The first day, for twenty-three hours, single dots should be sent out a. fre- quent and regular intervals, conclud- ing with the word one in the dots and dashes of the Morse system. After an hour’s interval the of two dots should be sent forth two days at the same intervals as be- fore, until the twenty-third hour of the second day, when the word two, spelled out in dots and dashes is to be series for sent. Again an hour should be allowed to elapse and then the serles of triple dots should be sent for three days, con cluding, in the twenty-third hour of the third day, with the word three. This system should be continued until all the numbers up to ten have been exhausted, ten days having been devoted to the tenfold dots until, at the twenty-third of the tenth y of this series, ten is spelled. After this an entire day should be allowed to intervene before the experi- ment is begun agaln, starting, as be- fore, with the single dots. The hour which is to elapse between each series is intended for the purpose of making it reasonably clear that the word with which each series ends belongs to that particular series, rather than to the one which follows it. And, for a similar reason, twenty: four hours should alwa: be allowed to intervene between one serial period and the mext one. Now, it cannot be but that any in- telligent person perceiving so regular a series of signals, kept up for months or years, will at last come to correlate the phenomenon with that simplest of all the forms or channels of his fac- ulty of perception—time He will note that to the one-dot se- is devoted a perfod of time which just half as long as the time de- and that to the ren just three hour the word i voted to two dots sories of three dots is g times as much time as to the fir: to the four-dot four times much time, and so on up to and in- cluding ten t one, series as Unless the observer is incomprehen- will be forced upon him that whoever is merely sibly dull, it sending the signals is counting over and over again o ten, and the dot-and-dash sign at the end of cach serles he will un doubtedly at least tentatively, to be the arithmetical of the particular series which it concludes. It there should at last come a re sponse sufficiently clear to show that the signals from earth have actually been received, the message should be varied as follow: “One and two are three.” The distant orb dwellers would by this time know or have guessed the meaning of two, and in regard to the new words “and” and they would require but little ingenuity to guess at the mean- up ssume name one, three; two “are,” ing. Method of Communication Of course, they would not call “one” by the name as we, any niore Frenchman, a Germnan or a Hungarian, although it so hap- that in the languages of the latter the equivalent words are aiso of three letters; as, “une” in French, ein” in German and “egy” in Hunga- rian. But, coming with every indica tion of an intention that the three let- the dots and dashes same than would a pens ters signified by constitute unit, would give them a such as, let us assume, “bat or the like. Provisionally then, the three elgns which to us spell one would, to them, always spell bat or can, etc., but in effect the meaning conveyed would always be equivalent to “one.” And so also in regard to the other numbers. Therefore, when our sig- nals will have conveyed to them the information that one and one are two, two and two are four, three and three are six, etc., they will know precisely what we no matter how they spell or pronounce it. And as thelr take the cue from us message of exactly the same import, we will be in a fair way of enlarging the knowledge of the respective cabularies in a very brief time For the twelve words with which we have already made them famillar contain sixteen letters of our alpha- bet; ndmely, a, c, d, ¢, £, g, h, 1, n, o, r, s, t, U, v and x. Although there are missing from this number the letters b J, k, 1, m q W, v and z, we can easily make shift to get along on what we have, especially as our list braces every one of the vowels—a, e, i. 0 and u. With such a good start there should be no difficulty in conveying the entirs alphabet; and, following this, to spell out the numeral adjectives up to a hundred. dwellers form, the orb provisior can,” mean replles will probably and be a return vo- em- ‘The next step in this course of in- struction to the star-dwellers would be the entire multiplication table. By this time they would have come to atta fixed meanings to a great many signs common to both of us, and an excellent working foundation would hdve been laid for what would eventually prove to be a complete sys tem of communication. Universal Codes It is also likely that those distant correspondents would have sent us a duplicate of what we have transmitted to them, enabling us to ascertain just what signs stand for the co: ond- ing or equivalent words in their lan- guage; and who shall say but that in the end we may be able to communi- cate with each other with as much fa cility as if we actually understood their language and they ours? Of course this means of communication, by the very nature of things, would never be other than that which is conducted by a cipher code. But this code system would eventually have at- tained so perfect a degree of practica- bility that, for all intents and pur- poses, it would be like the ideographs employed by the Chinese and Japa- nese, by which identical signs are used in both languages for words signifying the same things, although these words have an altogether different sound in Chinese from that in Japanese. Thus rice, I am informed, in Chinese is “bel,” while in Japanese it is “kome”; yet both are expressed alike in both lan guages by a common sign or ideo- graph If there are intelligent inhabitants ot any distant world, possessing the nee- of communication, a sn of this sort would compare most favorably with, let us say, the polar expeditions, to which S0 many lives and fortunes have been #acrificed, and if productive of affirma. tive results would prove infinitely more interesting, Instructive and advanta- geous than any good that could pos- sibly come from even the comrlete at- tainment of whatever it is that people are after when they set out for the Arctic or Antarctic regions, pe x e essary means persistent camp: