Contact: The Day After

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 486.

Below is an article that can help you to answer some of the above questions. After reading the text, try to formulate the main idea of the passage. Then answer the questions after the text.

PART I

Modal verbs of probability

Modal verbs can express ability, obligation, permission and request. They can also express the idea of probability or how certain a situation is. When we want to speculate or make deductions about a particular situation, we can use the following modal verbs:

must, can't when we are 99% sure about something.

may (not), might (not), could when we think something is possible.

These modal verbs can be followed by simple, continuous or perfect infinitives.

Present/Future: Elliott thinks he could determine whether a signal bears the characteristics of a

language.

We might never interpret it (simple infinitive)

They could be listening to our conversation right now (continuous infinitive)

It can't be true.

Past: They can't have produced a similar effect (perfect infinitive)

Scientists must have examined the problem in detail.

He might have provided them with the information they needed.

Warm-up (1)

Before reading the passage below, let us explain the following notions:

computer-processing power

computing advances

extraterrestrial civilization

worldwide collaborative effort

SETI

UFO

NASA

level of intelligence

Pre-reading (1)

Read the introduction to the article Contact: The Day After.

Computer-processing power has roughly been doubling every two years for the past 50. Some scientists believe that within 30 years or so, computing advances will allow them to sift through enough frequencies to have a reasonable shot at finding a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. This worldwide collaborative effort is known as SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “My guess is that the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy right now must be 10 000”, Frank Drake says, who is now chairman emeritus at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. ”That means one of every some millions of stars has a detectable civilization.”

Discussion:If Drake is right - if we are within a few decades of discovering that we are not alone in the universe-what then? What might happen after we detected a signal from an alien intelligence? Could we even translate the message? How likely is it that the message might contain knowledge that would transform our culture? Would it be dangerous to respond and reveal our existence to beings from other worlds? Discuss in groups and answer the questions.

Reading (1)

It happened at about 6 a.m. on a June morning 13 years ago. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute's research center, was at the Green Bank observatory when the signal came in. It was a bunch of signals at discrete frequencies, with uniform spacing between them, which looked on a graph like a comb. Tarter and her colleagues at Green Bank followed their protocols to rule out false alarms. They swung the telescope away from the target star. The signal vanished. They aimed at the star again. The signal came back. Ordinarily they would have verified the precise origin of the signal with a separate telescope. But lightning has recently struck that telescope and fried its hard drive. By late afternoon the target star that was thought to be the source of the signal began to set below the horizon. That was when her team realized something was wrong. Although the target star was setting, the source of the signal seemed to be climbing, its strength undiminished. The signal, they eventually determined, was coming from a NASA satellite. “The beauty of a false alarm is that you see what really happens” Tarter says. “It's no longer theoretical. You have these protocols, but what really happens? People don't follow protocols. It's not that people do anything mischievous - you're so caught up in the excitement of the moment, the media are immediately calling you, people send e-mails to their friends.”

In the event of a signal that survives initial scrutiny - one that is quickly verified by a second observatory with a separate telescope - the astronomers who made the discovery must send an International Astronomical Union telegram to observatories around the world. What could happen next? A triumphant announcement, followed by headlines? Panic? New Age celebrations? Probably none of the above, except for the headlines. First, while we may be able to detect that there is a signal that at least initially appears distinctly artificial, even that claim would be questioned. There would be a lot of people trying to come up with the natural explanations. Second, even if the signal is confirmed as an authentic transmission from an extraterrestrial civilization, it is unlikely that astronomers would be able to extract any information from it for many years. SETI's instruments are designed to search for steady, periodic narrowband radio pulses. The pulse itself would yield no information, other than its artificial nature. Any message content would likely be in the form of changes in amplitude or frequency buried within the pulse. Resolving the message would require an antenna far more powerful than Earth's largest, the 305 –meter dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Constructing such an instrument might require international collaboration and funding, with no guarantee that the message could ever be deciphered.

Then, the lack of any further knowledge about the nature of that alien intelligence might limit the immediate cultural impact. Some SETI researchers assumed –and still assume - that the language of science could provide common ground for communication. But Kathryn Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Toronto doesn't agree: “We run into an irreducible problem with communication that isn't face to face. If you and I speak different languages, and we're in the same room, I can point to a table, and I can say ‘table', and you infer that ‘table' is my word for that thing, and then we can go from there. If you're not in direct contact, if you can't do that kind of pointing exercise, there's always this question of what you're referring to in these initial communications.” Scientists tend to be more prone to think that because we'll be dealing with the same physical structures in the universe, we can use them to speak and build up from there - send each other the value of pi, and then we're off to the races. Even if it proves impossible to directly translate the message, it might be possible to discover patterns that they suspect are fundamental to all languages. Those patterns might reveal something about the nature of beings who sent the message, particularly how their level of intelligence compares with our own. But anthropologists tend to be not so comfortable with that. Errors can take place right at the get-go. For example, if I give you a signal-beep, beep, beep- is that three or two? Are we counting the beeps or the spaces?

Some SETI proponents suggest we should do more than passively wait for a signal. They believe we should transmit messages and let anyone who might be listening know that we are here. Last spring, however, in a Discovery Channel series, Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge said that transmitting messages without knowing what is out there could be dangerous. “If aliens visit us”, he said, “the outcome might be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.”

But in any case, it is probably too late. There is no reason why an extraterrestrial civilization couldn't spot Earth using the same –or better- techniques that terrestrial astronomers are already using to find planets around other stars. Aliens who have a mere 1,000-year head start on us could be listening to our conversation right now being aware that intelligence is common in the universe.

(by Tim Folger

Scientific American, 2011)

Comprehension questions:

1. What happened at the Green Bank observatory 13 years ago?

2. How come they didn't verify the precise origin of the signal?

3. When did the scientists realize that something was wrong?

4. What would happen if the signal was verified?

5. What could limit the immediate cultural impact?

6. Could there be anything common to refer to in the initial communication?

7. What would happen if aliens visited us?

Vocabulary (1)