How Stephen Wolfram Devised Interstellar Travel (And Code Samples) For 'Arrival' (backchannel.com)

The new movie "Arrival" depicts first contact with aliens, and its producers faced the question of how interstellar spacecraft would actually work. They turned to futurist Stephen Wolfram, who came up with an answer overnight, and also tasked his son with writing much of the computer code seen on displays in the movie. Slashdot reader mirandakatz brings us Wolfram's story: Christopher was well aware that code shown in movies often doesn't make sense (a favorite, regardless of context, seems to be the source code for nmap.c in Linux). But he wanted to create code that would make sense, and would actually do the analyses that would be going on in the movie... For instance, there's a nice shot of rearranging alien "handwriting," in which one sees a Wolfram Language notebook with rather elegant Wolfram Language code in it. And, yes, those lines of code actually do the transformation that's in the notebook. It's real stuff, with real computations being done...

For the movie, I wanted to have a particular theory for interstellar travel. And who knows, maybe one day in the distant future it'll turn out to be correct. But as of now, we certainly don't know. In fact, for all we know, there's just some simple "hack" in existing physics that'll immediately make interstellar travel possible.
Wolfram's theory posited that space is just one of the attributes emerging from a low-level network of nodes, where long-range connections occasionally break out of three-dimensional space altogether. His 6,900-word essay (originally published on his blog) also suggests film-making has "some structural similarities" with software development -- and grapples with the question of how we'd actually communicate with aliens once they've arrived.

Comments

Re:Why is this news?

[samkass]

Now that we've gotten the "why is this on Slashdot?" post out of the way, can someone please complain about Slashdot editors and then somehow find a way to work in a criticism of SJW's and Microsoft so we can get on with the rest of the comments?

Space is man's hopeless romance

[Chewbacon]

Unless there is the "simple physics hack" space travel will be a royal pain in the ass when you take the planning that is involved. The energy problems, bio issues, logistics, all of it.

Even if we overcome all of that, you'll be flying into the unknown. Think about it: you want to go see the pillars of creation a thousand light years away. There was a discussion that an explosion may have occurred or was imminent that would destroy them... a thousand years ago. So even if you found the hack tomorrow (say toasting pop tarts still in the Mylar in an upside down toaster) that lets you arrive at the pillars, or anywhere else, instantaneously, then whatever you went to see would have changed or have been long gone over the millennia. This is something sci-fi never fully discloses: hey, see that in the telescope? Let's go! Wait, where the fuck is it??

So for an advanced civilization to find us and make contact, they'd have to have been watching for the past, what, 100 years to pick up on the noise we make or make on hell of a guess as to where we are.

Still sounds like an adventure.

alien communication

[holophrastic]

I love when scientists describe intelligent alien communications as being difficult due to different "contexts". It really shows just how far scientists have travelled outside of their cities.

Communications-outside-of-context are done all the time. Humanity's historical cultures don't play any role in a Canadian adult speaking with a third-world african child. Yet it's done all the time.

Similarly, adopt a puppy. Learn to live with any intelligent animal. The first time that you catch your puppy in a lie, you'll know that you've learned to communicate across "contexts".

If you want to communicate with an alien species, intelligent or otherwise, it's as easy as it's always been. Your "context" is the one thing you share -- the environment around you. Lock yourself in a room, a cabin in the woods, an asteroid adrift, a mysteriously-locked laboratory, and any two individuals (now sharing a "context") will figure out how to communicate with each other very very very quickly, and pretty darn efficiently too, using whatever works (physical touch, verbal commands, emotional cues, mechanical blocking, et cetera).

In my life, I've trained two birds, four dogs, three cats, and a girl. I've been trained by one dog, two cats, and that very same girl.

But this requires a very simple comprehension of communication, that I worry most people simply do not have. It is this: communication (of thought), however lengthy and prolonged, is the means to an end. That end is always action (or inaction). Taking away any opportunity for communication to surround action, makes communication utterly meaningless. It simply must relate to something else. And obviously so, since the communication of thought requires thought first, and that thought must be of something -- most often of truth. And any truth, once again, comes down to an observable and testable action.

Train a puppy. Along the way, you'll discover that the puppy has trained you too. Sit back, and notice the new common language that's formed between you. It takes about a week -- most of which is about discovering the shared environment that now requires a common language -- you didn't need to talk to each other when you didn't share a house.