The Science of Arrival
The science of Arrival: what the film got right (and wrong)
In the film, Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is tasked with deciphering the language of the mysterious heptapods who have arrived on Earth
Saturday 12 November 2016
Paramount Pictures
What if we made contact with alien life? How would we communicate?
That's the premise of the film Arrival, based on the short story, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, opening in cinemas this week. The protagonist, linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams), is tasked with deciphering the language of the mysterious heptapods who have arrived on Earth in giant floating ships.
But while the film’s portrayal of first contact is a little fantastical, the basic idea of how to communicate isn't far off the mark.
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Below, we’ve taken a look at some talking points from the film, although note there are some mild spoilers if you haven’t seen it yet.
Language
In Arrival, Banks is confronted with a bizarre alien language and is asked to decipher it. Spoken, it sounds like whale or dolphin noises, and written it’s a circular array of inky patterns known as logograms.
In order to communicate, Banks writes down English words and acts out what they mean. In turn, the heptapods reply with their logograms, and Banks works to find meaning within the patterns.
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The end goal is to discover the aliens’ purpose on Earth, but before that can be asked, Banks is insistent she must understand their language to prevent any misunderstandings. And, it turns out, this is a pretty good way to begin deciphering an unknown language.
“The insistence that they can’t jump straight to the big question is absolutely right,” Jessica Coon, an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University and a consultant on the film, told WIRED.
“You have to really understand some of the smaller pieces of grammar before you work up to the big question, because there’s a lot of potential for misunderstanding.”
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And that’s exactly what Banks does. With human languages, of which there are several thousand, similar techniques are used in translation. So getting a basic grip is not a bad idea before attempting to hold a meaningful conversation.
Re-wiring the brain
Paramount Pictures
Later on in the film, Banks’ brain is “re-wired” as she learns the alien language, leading to a groundbreaking revelation. This is a concept known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory that learning a new language can lead to a drastic change in how we think.
While it’s an interesting concept, Coon said the theory to those extremes probably wouldn’t hold true in the real world. “I don’t know of anybody who would argue that speaking a different language would radically alter anyone’s view of the world,” she said.
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Making contact
The chances of an alien race ever coming to visit Earth are pretty slim, but it’s not unreasonable to think there might be something out there in the two trillion or so galaxies.
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If there is an intelligent alien race, chances are its emitting electromagnetic waves, possibly radio waves, just like us. To this end, scientists have been searching the sky for any such signals for decades.
Of course, we’ve found nothing so far, but if we ever are to make contact, signal-based communication over many light-years is probably our best bet. Any attempt at conversation, though, would be fairly lengthy.
“I’m not holding my breath that aliens will ever travel to Earth,” Douglas Vakoch, President of the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Meti) organisation, which considers how we might communicate with a distant race, told WIRED.
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“In the real world, a roundtrip exchange with ET by radio could take centuries or millennia. That’s a serious obstacle for understanding one another. It’s less like a conversation and more like decoding a lost language.”
Communicating
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, we were able to hold a conversation with a distant race. At that point, it’s probably time to ask Banks for help again.
In Arrival, one group of scientists announces it tried to communicate with the heptapods by sending the same messages back to them. This is a good idea for radio contact too; it lets someone know we’re here.
“It is a good plan, as they will know we have received it and identified it as a message from another advanced civilisation,” John Elliott, from Leeds Beckett University and the UK SETI Research Network, told WIRED.
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If a message was sent our way on purpose, it may also contain some sort of key to decipher it. And this would be crucial in holding any sort of meaningful conversation. “We will need a common frame of reference – something akin to a Rosetta Stone,” said Elliott.
Artificial gravity
Paramount Pictures
One of the key questions from Arrival is: how did aliens create artificial gravity in their ship?
Gravity is dictated by mass. If you want to pull something down with Earth-like gravity then you need something with the mass of Earth.
But in Arrival, the aliens’ spaceships clearly has something else going on. Given that the aliens have managed to invent interstellar travel, we guess they’ve likely got some other advanced technology going on. But this is never addressed.
Atmosphere
Different planets have different atmospheres. Take Earth and Mars, for instance – ours is 78 per cent nitrogen and 21 per cent oxygen, compared to 95 per cent carbon dioxide and 2.7 per cent nitrogen on the Red Planet.
This means that the idea an alien race would live in a different atmosphere in Arrival is of course an accurate, and obvious, one. This is something that has been touched on in sci-fi before, notably in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, where Earth’s atmosphere ultimately defeats the invading Martian army.
And it’s not just the atmosphere; us fragile humans need various injections to help them survive diseases the aliens might be carrying. The possibility of accidentally introducing a foreign virus into an ecosystem is very real.
All in all, Arrival does well. And perhaps best of all, it gives some welcome attention to linguistics, something you’d not typically expect to see in a major sci-fi film.