Lemuria

“Elvis Christ, Helga. They built Olympus out there and you‘re sending them prime numbers?” Kat remarked, sliding deftly past her commander in the zero-g confines of the control module.

Her attention barely dented, Helga continued her work at the computer interface, selecting from the hundreds of options a team of exolinguists had stored before they left home. Without looking over her shoulder she answered “A person must start somewhere, and besides, I have a weakness for the classics.”

At the time of the Intrepid’s departure from the Sol system, terrestrial scientists were deeply divided about the prospects of meaningful contact with a truly alien intelligence. Pessimists argued that every translation of a new language depended upon common points of reference; objects, places, parts of the body, economic transactions, and human gestures such as pointing and enunciating words. Interstellar visitors could have no hope of employing such shortcuts. Human beings were born with a repertoire of dozens of innate facial expressions, gestures, and syntactical similarities that made the various human forms of communication close cousins compared with anything they could expect to find employed by an extraterrestrial culture. This fact alone was a nearly insurmountable barrier to communication. When combined with the inevitable gulf in the thought processes and world views of the two cultures, the task of establishing contact was Herculean at best

It was a sore spot among the exobiologists of Helga’s day three of the most interesting nonhuman intelligences on Earth; cetaceans, elephants, and apes, had all been driven to extinction in the twenty-first century, before any meaningful understanding of their minds had been established.

Optimists argued that any alien species possessing advanced technology was bound to share at one thing in common with our own-an understanding of mathematics. Helga, originally a mathematician herself, tempered this philosophy with an understanding that math itself was a multifaceted subject studded with anthropomorphisms. One reason for her appointment as commander of the mission had been her eloquent and popular publications asserting that the problem could never be solved from a purely theoretical point of view. To answer the question, it was necessary to find an extraterrestrial civilization and attempt communication.

Helga completed her protocol of communication attempts: the first ten integers, followed by the first ten integers squared, followed by the first ten prime numbers. It was a sequence that carried little in the way of cultural value. To an alien being with an understanding of mathematics, however, it potentially communicated the signature of an intelligent mind.