UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

**"Arrival" (November 2016) explores how humanity would discern aliens' purpose on Earth.**
**Credit: Arrival Movie via Facebook**

In the new film "Arrival," based on Ted Chiang's novella "Story of Your Life," alien visitors appear all around Earth and humankind scrambles to understand their purpose in visiting.

The movie's creators initially approached the computation company Wolfram Research — creator of the math programming language Mathematica, the online problem-solver Wolfram Alpha and more — to produce some charts for use in the movie. Instead, they wound up with a consultant: company founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram, whose ideas about interstellar travel, alien communication and the progress of science informed the entire movie (even if not much made it onscreen). His son, Christopher, generated visualizations for them to use.

Wolfram explained many of the ideas he came up with, and his experience creating "scientific set dressing," on his blog. As he told Space.com, "Who's to know? Maybe something that I invented for science fiction will turn into some real physics." [8 Modern Astronomy Mysteries Scientists Still Can't Explain]

Space.com talked with Wolfram about the way science fits into movies, how aliens are like artificial intelligences and whether math is invented or discovered — and what that would mean for alien mathematics and alien thought.

Space.com: How were you approached to work on the project?

Stephen Wolfram: Because a lot of scientists use our software systems and we produce a lot of interesting graphics, we have a pretty regular stream of requests from moviemakers of various kinds saying, "Can we show this graphic in our movie." This one was kind of amusing, because it was like — we're about to start shooting this fairly big-budget movie, and we need these screens that should look realistic and can you help us do this? We're starting to shoot in two weeks.

The only way one can do that is to say "show us the script," because otherwise you don't know what on Earth you're trying to dress [the set] for. I don't think the people who approached us for the movie were particularly expecting that I was going to look at them. It's just that in a company like ours, if the request is sufficiently bizarre it eventually winds up at me.

Space.com: What parts of the science were already there before you joined on?

Wolfram: There are three levels that one could take the science at. One is the "what the aliens are really doing" type thing, which is future science we don't know yet, at the other end there's the high-school level physics, and in the middle is the leading edge of what physics might have to say about it if a great big black spaceship showed up in your backyard today. I was trying to channel the last of those things, what the high end of physics today would say about these, and they had ended up quite a lot with what the high school physics version would be, which didn't seem like such a good fit.

They hadn't really thought about it. Movies are made or broken by the personal stories, and the science is mostly just dressing. It's fun for science-types to see the science as right or wrong. There's some movies where the science is close enough to what we have that what you can do in the movie really makes a statement about where science can go today. This movie, the science is far enough away from what we have today that it doesn't point us in any particular direction. I had fun figuring out a few things I hadn't figured out about interstellar space travel, and so on, but this movie is much more about alien communication, which happens to be a topic that I've thought a lot about, than it is about some space travel.

Space.com: What are your thoughts on the challenge of communication?

Wolfram: I think that the basic notion of "what do we mean by intelligence" is — it's very hard to have an abstract definition of intelligence that goes beyond just saying it does sophisticated computation. There's an awful lot of stuff that does sophisticated computation, my favorite example being the weather — which many people would say has a mind of its own, so to speak.

In modern times, there's a lovely parallel between extraterrestrial communication and AI [Artificial Intelligence] communication. They're both cases where we're dealing with an intelligence that doesn't have the same historical lineage that ours does.

You've got a neural net and it's learned to recognize 10,000 kinds of things in the world. Cats and dogs and telephones and chairs and who knows what else. And you look inside the neural nets and it's made all kinds of distinctions about how to describe the world [which] we can think of like descriptive words for aspects of those objects. But they're not words that exist in our historically derived language.

In the "Arrival" movie, the fact that the question of greatest interest is "what is your purpose here" — that has a fascinating resonance with probably what is in many ways what is one of the most important questions for AI, which is, you built an AI, what is it supposed to do, what is its purpose supposed to be. … Among the purposes we don't want is "take over the world and get rid of the humans" type thing. But there's a question of how do you get to the point where you can represent purpose in this kind of way that we humans think about purpose. [SETI: All About the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Infographic)]

**An image analysis of the aliens' writing in "Arrival," as generated by Wolfram Research**
**Credit: Wolfram Research**

**An image analysis of the aliens' writing in "Arrival," as generated by Wolfram Research**
**Credit: Wolfram Research**

Space.com: Did you come to any conclusion about the best way to do that?

Wolfram: One thing I thought about for the "Arrival" movie was what do you use to communicate? Do you use math-like stuff or do you use more computation/programming language type stuff? I think the computation/programming language type stuff is actually better than the math-type stuff, but people don't know the words for that so it's not very useful for dialogue in the movie.

[An interesting question] about math and aliens is how much of math is invented by humans as a specific historical accident and how much of it is really just out there and merely discovered by humans. And that's an important question if you're thinking about "Did the aliens make the same math we made?" I think that an awful lot of math is very much in the invented by humans [category].

Space.com: What makes you think that?

Wolfram: The first fact familiar to all kids is that math is kind of hard. It could be the case that once you set up the axioms of math, every question that could be asked would then be easy to answer. That is true for certain kinds of axiomatic systems; it doesn't happen to be true for mathematics. In other words, the fact that there are hard questions in mathematics is the first interesting metafact about mathematics. And as we know from Gödel's [Incompleteness] Theorem, there are in a sense infinitely hard questions in mathematics.

So one of the questions is, how come math is doable but hard, as opposed to being essentially infinitely hard and just full of undecidable questions. I think the answer to that is because human mathematicians have carefully walked along those little pieces of land in this ocean of undecidable, infinitely hard math. Did they walk along the unique such paths? Or did they walk along paths that were just the ones that happened to be historically explored? You could ask the same thing about biological evolution. Are the organisms that exist today the inexorable organisms that have to exist after 2.5 billion years on a planet with this chemistry? Or are they the organisms that are simply the result of a series of historical accidents. The question in both cases of how much historical accident, how much inexorable consequences of the situation.

My guess, for math — I've gradually changed my views, a little bit, about this. I'm softening a little bit in my point of view. I had believed that it was really, deeply historical accident, but I think some aspects, I'm becoming a little bit convinced might be slightly more inexorable than I had imagined.

**A still from the 2016 sci-fi film "Arrival.” In the movie, 12 alien spaceships land on Earth in different locations around the globe.**
**Credit: Paramount Pictures**

Space.com: So some aspects of mathematics might be common for aliens and humans, but a lot wouldn't overlap?

Wolfram: [Take] binary, base 2 numbers. The I Ching, from ancient China, kind of uses those — and there are places where they'd been kind of invented a long time ago, but really nobody cared until modern times, as computers and the whole wave of technology that makes good use of binary numbers. Would the aliens care about binary numbers? Well, if you'd gone back 500 years in human mathematical history and you'd been talking with [François] Vieta, the inventor of algebra, about binary numbers, he wouldn't have had a clue, probably. And yet, today, binary numbers look to be fundamental, simple, it's-obvious type aspects of mathematics. That's an example of a historical accident. … I think that the challenge in all these cases with alien intelligence of any kind is there's a big computational universe of possible things you can compute about out there, and the particular ones that one has sampled are very dependent on the detailed history of a civilization.

Space.com: Is there any concept you invented for this movie that you're thinking about exploring more?

Wolfram: [One] thing that I did think about for this movie is the following question: Is there an infinite frontier of technology? If we know the fundamental theory of physics, are we done, or is there always more to discover? What you realize is it's very similar to the problem of axioms in mathematics and how math is hard, and ideas like Gödel's Theorem — it's an almost theoretically necessary fact that there is an infinite frontier of technologies to discover. You can always build a more complicated program.

Another question is, is there more interesting stuff to discover? We can write down an infinite number of theorems in some area of mathematics, but we might say we've gotten all the interesting ones. All the other ones are ornate, uninteresting things. That's a really interesting question I don't really know the answer to.

The question of interestingness is very closely related to these questions about purpose and cultural context, because what counts as interesting [depends on] what are you trying to do. A good example of this, coming from the Pythagoreans: They were really into the fact that 1+2+3+4=10, something that we consider now to be just, who cares. But for them, that was a profound fact. And I think that's an example of, is it interesting, or is it just some trivial arithmetical fact? It depends a lot on context.

It's far from obvious that as an alien you are going to be at all into trying to find out as much as possible. That might not be the point.

This interview has been edited for length.

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Here's How Extraterrestrial Farming Will Work on Mars — **Credit: FIT/20th Century Fox**

Landing humans on Mars would be a momentous event in human history. To live beyond Earth's biosphere is a dream to many, but establishing a sustainable presence on the Red Planet will require mastering its environment. We would need to devise ways of producing food where none exists, because depending on supplies from Earth would neither be sustainable or practical.

In the 2015 blockbuster movie "The Martian," Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is famously depicted planting potatoes in a makeshift greenhouse after getting stranded on Mars during an epic storm that forced the rest of his crew to abandon their mission. Using vacuum-packed potatoes from the mission's base, Watney planted them using the planet's "soil," produced water from chemical reactions and fertilized his burgeoning potato crop with the crew's freeze-dried poop.

It seems like a pretty straightforward method of cultivating plants on Mars — but deceptively so.

"It's nowhere near that easy," Ralph Fritsche, senior project manager for food production at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, told Seeker.

NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars by the 2030s, and Elon Musk's SpaceX has proposed an aggressive Mars colonization effort based on the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). But while SpaceX may have the expertise to transport people to Mars, there is no consideration as to how they might stay there and "live off the land" to produce food.

Considering that it would cost an estimated $1 billion per person per year just to send food from Earth to Mars, it quickly becomes clear that we need another plan for feeding future Mars explorers.

"Elon Musk has presented the world with a challenge," said Daniel Batcheldor, professor of physics and space sciences at the Florida Institute of Technologyand project lead for the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute. "Right now, we know that we cannot deliver the mass needed to the surface of Mars purely from stuff sent from Earth. We have to create a sustainable colony on Mars that is not dependent on resupplies from Earth."

Whether we're thinking about setting up our first Mars colony or supporting a small team of NASA astronauts, researchers are currently developing novel strategies for growing plants beyond Earth.

Fritsche and his NASA colleague Trent Smith have teamed up with scientists at the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute to investigate how we might really grow food on Mars. Though using astronauts' physical waste for fertilizer might play a role, everything from toxin removal to "designer bacteria" will be needed to create a Martian version of the soil that we take for granted here on Earth.

"There shouldn't be any organic matter in Mars regolith" — powdered rock on the planet's surface from eons of meteorite impacts — "and, in order to recycle the nutrients, you need to have decomposers to break down what's there to make it available, in the right form, for plants to use," said assistant professor Brooke Wheeler, of Florida Tech's College of Aeronautics. "That would be one potential strategy of making a colony more sustainable to recycle waste, whether that's human waste or leftover food for composting, or any other [organic] waste products to help build that into the design of the habitat."

Wheeler and her colleague Drew Palmer, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Florida Tech, are using a Mars regolith simulant in hopes of investigating how we might use native resources when we eventually land a human mission on Mars. The simulant, which is essentially powdered volcanic rock from Hawaii, contains none of the nutrients necessary for plants to grow, but it's the closest thing we have to approximating Martian regolith.

**The lettuce that was only grown in Mars only simulant (without added nutrients) produced only small leaves in the lab.**
**Credit: FIT/Buzz Aldrin Space Institute**

Though the regolith simulant is a good start, Wheeler and Palmer are realistic about its limitations. One of the biggest challenges is how future Mars astronauts will "remediate" the regolith of toxic chemicals that are known to be present on the planet. As confirmed by NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, Martian regolith is packed with salts called perchlorates, which are used in industrial processes on Earth and are known to trigger serious thyroid problems. The removal of perchlorates from Mars regolith is essential to making the plentiful resource appropriate for agriculture on Mars.

"One of the things we're keenly interested in is when we start to introduce microbes, we'd like to use engineered microbes that could eliminate things like the toxic perchlorates that will be in a lot of the soil," said Palmer. "You can engineer bacteria now, already on Earth, to do that."

But it doesn't stop there. As Mars doesn't have the soil microbes that form the backbone of the vital cycles that drive Earth's biosphere, we will need to introduce the bacteria and strategic plant life to the Martian regolith to ensure the plants receive the necessary nutrients.

"We believe that, in the long term, by reincorporating the microbes and organisms that co-exist with plants [on Earth] will be able to create sustainable nitrogen and phosphorus cycles [on Mars]," said Palmer.

The raw material behind these cycles is fertilizer, so when planning Mars agriculture, we need to consider how that will be sourced. Will it be shipped from Earth? Or will it be produced on site to reduce cost and the dependence on Earth?

"That's just more structures you have to build to supplement this [system]," Palmer added.

The researchers suggest that before a human even sets foot on Mars, a robotic mission could land months in advance with the sole purpose of preparing the Martian regolith for agriculture. Farm bots could extract the regolith and perform perchlorate remediation tasks while introducing the necessary biology to set up the cycles necessary for plant life to thrive. The idea is to establish a viable Mars farm ahead of a human mission that's ready for the astronauts to take over as soon as they land. Not only will there be fresh food waiting for them in their habs, but such a farm could also be supplementing life support systems with oxygen while regulating toxins in the air.

**Lettuce grown in Mars simulant with added nutrients produced healthy leaves.**
**Credit: FIT/Buzz Aldrin Space Institute**

The challenges of producing food on Mars are rich and varied, but one of the biggest benefits of physically growing plants on Mars would be a psychological one. As the project lead for the International Space Station's "Veggie" experiment — which uses hydroponics to supply plants with the necessary water and nutrients in a microgravity environment Trent Smith realized that the astronauts on the orbiting outpost took great joy in growing plants on an otherwise sterile environment away from home.

"Because they're on the space station, in a really hostile environment, with all these wires and cables and metal and plastic... when they have these little growing plants that they care for, it's their little piece of home, their little piece of nature," Smith remarked. "When we go to Mars, this is going to become really important."

The Veggie demonstration system famously produced lettuce that was consumed by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly during his year-long mission aboard the space station with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, but it cannot sustain astronauts in orbit alone — they remain wholly dependent on Earth for food. Though hydroponics will likely have a role to play in supplementing the diets of Mars explorers, we will ultimately need to depend on the resources the Red Planet has on offer to create and maintain a sustainable presence.

"Initially, as we go for months at a time, we might just do hydroponic farming… hydroponics are incredibly efficient," Smith noted. "But if you're going for an extended amount of time, then it makes sense to switch over to a regolith-farming system. You'll have these two different ways to grow plants for food."

Whichever way you look at it, we will need to use our technological prowess to re-learn how to farm in an inhospitable environment.

"It will basically be like going back to an early agrarian society, when we were learning how to farm the earth," said Batcheldor. "But instead of using fertile soil, we've basically got to make the soil on Mars."

"Establishing a permanent colony on Mars is going to be the ultimate act of sustainability for humanity," he added.

Originally published on Seeker.