Star Trek Shields For Tanks

Last week we talked about shields for protecting

astronauts. This week shields against projectiles.

But they both can use plasma. The Star Trek

shields absorb or deflect energy, but a hunk of rock

would go right through. Read the post to find the

PASS plasma system – it might work better than

a Star Trek graviton shield.

Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather are going to have the next “fight of the century” on May 2, 2015 in Las Vegas. In "the sweet science" it’s all about hit and don’t get hit. But just as important is to minimize the damage when you do get hit.

We talked last week about how we are developing plasma shields to protect astronauts from space radiation. In a way, that’s the “don’t get hit” part in a nutshell. But space radiation isn’t trying to hit you; it’s just there, and so are you.

In Star Trek, the deflector shields were meant to avoid or minimize the damage of things meaning to destroy them. Like Mayweather’s right cross, photon torpedoes are sent with bad intentions.

Today let’s concentrate on emerging technologies to protect ourselves from things coming at us with bad intentions. In practical terms, using the technology we have right now, this would be most considered armor, but we are quickly moving to deflector shields. And some new armors now have deflecting capabilities.

One of the problems with plasma-based deflector shields is that you are relying on charges to deflect charged things away from you. Projectile weapons are often uncharged, although the metals in them can be charged. You would have to rely on destroying them with energy before they got to you rather than deflecting them away – and engineers are working on that.

Armor is designed to blunt the effect of some projectile, or an explosion + shrapnel. In most cases, the thicker the armor the better – like the traditional methods of shielding spacecraft from cosmic radiation. But newer types of armor are meant to protect in a more pro-active way.

Osmium is the densest naturally occurring

element. This makes it great as a contrast for

transmission electron microscopy. Here we see the

layers of myelin sheath around a neuron in the

brain. The dark lines are the lipid in each layer, as

fats pick up the osmium best.

After the refit of the Enterprise, Mr. Scott described a type of shield to be used that was more like armor. The replicator would produce a wall of very hard metal, I think they used a diburnium-osmium alloy. Then the transporter would project that alloy outside the ship’s hull, like a second layer of the hull. The Defiant had an ablative armor shield as well. Heck, so did Iron Man.

Ablative armor is a physical shield intended to be sacrificed. Its destruction dissipates much of the energy of the incoming projectiles or beam. We use ablative armor on returning vehicles from space. The heat shield tiles on the old Apollo missions were a form of ablative armor. The space shuttles had reusable tiles, but Orion is going back to an ablative system on the underside portion of the vehicle that will be hottest (4000˚ F).

A newer technology, called advanced ablative armor, will anticipate an attack and put additional armor where needed when needed. It's essentially a big catcher’s glove - stick it out where the pitch is coming.  Fullerene would be a good candidate for ablative armor – it is strong and light.

Real science has made more use of reactive armor than ablative armor. Reactive armor is also called active protection. This armor does something to protect the target, it doesn't rely on its material strength alone.

The earliest type of reactive armor was (and is) explosive. Explosive reactive armor (ERA) is meant to repel the killing mechanism of anti-tank missiles and rockets. High explosive armor piercing (HEAT) projectiles do their damage by breaking the outer hull by kinetic force, and then setting off an explosion that injects superheated copper through the hull and into the cab where the electronics and people are.

The army has been touting the effectiveness of ERA

since 2007, but the 2011 paper independently

confirmed it. This is a Bradley tank with the ERA

installed as an additive armor. It needs to be a certain

distance from the hull of the tank in order to protect it

maximally. Each individual box is an explosive unit, so

protection is precise to the area being struck.

ERA counters this by providing it’s own shape charged explosive. When the HEAT projectile pierces a thin metal plate on the outside of the tank, an explosion between it and the main hull of the tank throws a lot of energy out (away) from the hull. This counters the explosion and injection of liquid copper, repelling it away from the hull.

What you have to watch out for is tandem HEAT weapons, where one is fired right after the other at the same target point. The ERA charge which protects against the first won’t be there for the second.

ERA has been around since the late 1970’s, but there are new versions that actually sense the incoming round and set off the explosive armor BEFORE the rocket gets to the tank or the personnel carrier. Advanced ERA's been further improved by making the inside of the charge non-explosive, merely a rubber that turns to gas and expands the outer plate before the HEAT weapon hits. This is called bulge armor and is helpful against that second shot from a HEAT weapon, not just the first.

Electric reactive armors are being developed as well. One type uses two charged plates separated by an insulator. When a projectile penetrates the outer hull, the first plate touches the second. This completes an electrical circuit that releases a large electric charge and destroys the projectile.

A second type of electrical armor, developed by the British Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, uses a thin layer of a supercapacitor (a material that can store a large electrical charge over time) just internal to the outer armor. When a projectile is sensed by the radar/video/ESP of the armored target, it releases the charge from the capacitor onto the outer metal armor at the precise spot that is being targeted. This creates a huge EM field with flux lines spreading out from the target and acts as a temporary force field to repel/deflect/destroy the incoming projectile. Sounds a lot like a Star Trek deflector shield to me.

The American Defense labs have a version of reactive armor as well, called the American Iron Curtain. It's termed an Active Protection System (APS – because the military is the best in the world at creating initialisms). In this system, highly sophisticated radar and optical systems detect incoming projectiles and even classifies them as to their type and danger.

Projectiles are then fired down from the top of the targeted vehicle to intercept the incoming round and render it a dud. It doesn’t make them blow up early, it deactivates them with a projectile so they can’t blow up. They then just bounce of the hull. Iron Curtain was integrated into several different vehicle defense system in 2012 and 2013.

The left image is the vehicle based PASS system

ready to be deployed by the US Army as a nonlethal

crowd control device. On the right is the plasma

clouds produced by the primary laser. In the near

future, there will be hundreds of plasma cloud spots

and they will be able to form three dimensional shapes.

There is even a plasma-based shield weapon on the way. The United States Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center has developed a system called PASS (plasma acoustic shield system). Originally designed in 2007 to be a deterrent by creating a disorienting flash bang, the technology has come far in the past couple of years.

PASS uses a couple of high power lasers. The first creates an intense energy beam that strips the air molecules of their electrons, creating a plasma cloud. The plasma creation (very hot at the point of plasma, but dissipating rapidly as you move away, creates a small explosion, more like a loud bang.

A second laser then hits the plasma cloud just milliseconds later. The plasma absorbs the energy, expands rapidly which creates a shockwave and an even bigger bang. You can set this system up to fire repeatedly in a pattern, creating a wall of light and sound. Depending on the energy levels of the lasers, the wall will appear at various distances from the source.

Increase the energy of the wall (or whatever shape you want to project) and PASS can go from purely disorienting to lethal. Or it could disrupt incoming fire. This was the aim of the US Navy Plasma Point Defense System that was abandoned on the 2000’s, but advances present in PASS have made it feasible again. The PASS wall can’t be seen through and is impenetrable to infrared waves, but it carries some of the same drawbacks as Star Trek shields; you can’t see out either, and you couldn’t fire through it.

Finally, metamaterials may act as a defense shield some day. Structure in three dimensions gives metamaterials their characteristics instead of just the molecules of the material that makes them up. To give an example, cotton T-shirts have certain characteristics based on being made of cotton (soft, stretchy, can be dyed, shows off my guns, etc.). But a metamaterial T-shirt made from cotton might be able to deflect sound waves or do some other amazing things with EM waves, based on the shape that the cotton fibers are given in the shirt.

A soundproof room is a pretty good model for a absorbing metamaterial. 
The quietest room in the world is in Minneapolis. The cones at high 
angles bounce the sound into the other cones at 90˚ from the

first. Sound checks in but doesn’t check out. Metamaterials that absorb 
EM radiation do the same thing, they are just a billion times smaller, 
smaller than the wavelength of the light they absorb.

Recent papers have shown that certain metamaterials can act as energy absorbers. A group from Poland published a study in 2014 that used S-shaped metamaterials cells can absorb low frequency energy. The energy waves enter the S-shaped cells and bounce around until there energy is dissipated. Right now the potential use is for shielding electronics from EM pulses, but they could expand.

For an invisibility cloak, you would want the metamaterial to bounce the light around like a prism and then let it go after it passes around the object. But a cloaked object using an absorbing metamaterial would look black; the absorber doesn’t reflect the light so none returns to your eye. This would make for a bad cloak but a great shield - if you can find a way to keep the absorbed energy from destroying the shield.

Right now, the absorbers work in the low gigahertz range, so they absorb radio and microwaves, but a new study shows that some are being developed that absorb in the terahertz range. This is within infrared and visible light frequencies, the types of light used in high-energy laser weapons. Go a bit higher and perhaps we could absorb ultraviolet waves. But wouldn’t that just be sunscreen?

Next week – Mr. Data was an android, but at his most basic he was a robot with artificial intelligence. We’ve got rudimentary robots, but that AI thing is tougher.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Mayseless, M. (2011). Effectiveness of Explosive Reactive Armor Journal of Applied Mechanics, 78 (5) DOI: 10.1115/1.4004398

Yoo, Y., Zheng, H., Kim, Y., Rhee, J., Kang, J., Kim, K., Cheong, H., Kim, Y., & Lee, Y. (2014). Flexible and elastic metamaterial absorber for low frequency, based on small-size unit cell Applied Physics Letters, 105 (4) DOI: 10.1063/1.4885095

Grześkiewicz, B., Sierakowski, A., Marczewski, J., Pałka, N., & Wolarz, E. (2014). Polarization-insensitive metamaterial absorber of selective response in terahertz frequency range Journal of Optics, 16 (10) DOI: 10.1088/2040-8978/16/10/105104

Shields Up! Lay In A Course For Mars

No one can deny that Gene Roddenberry was a futurist, even if that 

wasn’t his profession. Futurists like Michio Kaku emulate

 the ideas that Roddenberry put forth in an entertainment venue but 
gave people so much to think about and shoot for.

Gene Roddenberry wasn’t a scientist. He took only a few college courses, and most of those were writing classes. He was an accomplished pilot, so he knew about lift and some basic physics, but his only civilian job outside of writing was as a Los Angeles police officer.

His first TV scripts in LA reflected this line of work; he wrote for TV shows called The Lieutenant, Have Gun - Will Travel, and Highway Patrol. So where did all that sciencey technology come from?

Roddenberry was definitely a futurist. This series of posts has shown, if nothing else, just how savvy he was in creating fictional technologies that had an uncanny ability to become science realities. But, for the life of me, where did he come up with gravitons – subatomic particles that assign gravity to matter? He was walking a beat in LA in the 1960's. That sounds like a lot more than just a convenient story-telling convention.

Gravitons played a role in several of the Star Trek technologies, including today’s topic - deflector shields, or just “shields.” There are a couple of different explanations as to how the shields on the USS Enterprise worked, but the earlier and more accepted explanation in the Star Trek cannon is that the ship had emitters that sent out graviton fields.

Star Trek proposed two kinds of shields, one was large and ellipsoid. It 
protected a large area besides just the ship. The second was contoured 
and was held just meters outside the hull. The shields also had

problems – you could fire through them unless you matched their 
frequency and you couldn’t transport through them.

The gravity field generated around the ship by the emitters protected the it by warping space-time and deflecting matter/energy away from the hull. The force field wasn’t based solely on electromagnetic energy, but it must have played a role, since Geordi, Mr. Scott, and Spock were constantly suggesting to alter the shield frequencies.

The idea of an electromagnetic shield is much closer to our reality at present, since we haven’t yet identified a graviton particle. Electromagnetism was a great choice for Roddenberry, since we all have experience with magnetic fields (two similar poles on magnets will repel each other). Electrical fields likewise repel similar charges. This sounds like a force field we could believe in for the defense of a ship.

Humans on Earth in 2015 don’t have a real need for shields geared to interstellar battle – we haven’t blundered into space wars yet. But we do have a very pressing need for deflector shields in space. And we’re coming close to achieving them.

NASA, the ESA, and many other space programs are taking aim at Mars. We have sent probes, rovers, and satellites; now it’s time for humans to make the trip. But this brings big problems along with the big promise. Space is full of cosmic rays, high-energy electrons, high-speed protons and even heavier atoms. They can all kill you over time or fry your equipment.

Radiation in space will make you sick at the least, and don’t underestimate the problem of being sick in space – think about vomiting in a space suit. But it can also damage DNA and most certainly lead to infertility, given enough time and exposure.

All this damage could occur inside the space ship on a long journey to Mars or beyond, not just on space walks. Most high-energy radiation will pass through the hull of a spacecraft and do damage to the occupants. We need protective shields to keep out the bad particles and waves.

Six months on ISS doesn’t give an astronaut anywhere near the 
radiation exposure that six months on Mars, or going to and from

Mars, would. The reason is that the ISS is still within the Earth’s 
magnetosphere, so it’s protected from most of the dangerous

radiation. To go to Mars, we’ll have to take

our own shield along.

Star Trek: Insurrection showed us an example of using a force field to protect the crew. When Picard and mates were observing Ba’ku from a cloaked duckblind, they used a “chromodynamic shield” to deflect or block the metaphasic radiation that inundated the planet. A force field protected the crew, although it was protecting them from rays that would stop their aging and did in fact restore Geordi’s eyesight for a while.

We don’t have a chromodynamic shield, so we've been looking to more conventional mechanisms of shielding. We could always make the walls of a long distance spacecraft thicker. Concrete would work pretty well, if it was dense and about 2 ft thick. A foot or so of aluminum might do just as well. But these are very heavy. Heavy things don’t make for good space gear.

Interestingly, water is a great absorber of radiation. We could put it between the walls of a spacecraft and it could do a pretty good job of protecting the crew and the electronics.  Hydrogen gas might work as well; notice how water is just hydrogen and oxygen. The sleeping quarters on the ISS are lined with impregnated polyethylene as an additional radiation shield.

But what might work best? – human waste. A privately funded mission to Mars led by Dennis Tito plans to use the astronaut's own excrement as a radiation shield by packing it between the walls of the spacecraft. Organic molecules and water block radiation very nicely, and they’ll be producing more shielding every day. It’s a strange thought that a Mars mission might be jeopardized by constipation.

Dennis Tito is a billionaire investment manager, but first he 

was an engineer. He was the first person to purchase a ride 

into space (Russian rocket) and now he wants to fly 

people around Mars – not to Mars - just a flyby in 2018 

or so. The planets will be aligned to give a 501 day round 

trip then. He wants to use their waste as radiation shielding.

Thank goodness science has kept looking for radiation shields. It's quite the boon that we have natural examples to learn from. The ionosphere of Earth is a great deflector. It’s the reason short wave radio operators can send weak signals very, very far. They bounce off the bottom layers of the ionosphere and back down to Earth, called skywave or skipping. The lower the angle on the way up, the far they will be over the horizon when they bounce back down.

The ionsophere (80-1000 km altitude) is part of the atmosphere of Earth that protects us from cosmic radiation. It consists of ionized air molecules; the ionization comes from the Sun’s energy. What's an ionized gas called?  – plasma.

So we have a plasma shield around Earth – remember this as it will come up again. The magnetosphere (a 40,000 nanoTesla field goes out hundreds of thousands of km) is produced by the spinning of the Earth’s metallic outer core. It participates in the protection because the ions of plasma in the ionsophere are charged, and electrical charges in a magnetic field produce an electric field.

The magnetosphere, in coordination with the

plasmasphere, shunts most of the electrons of

the solar wind and the high energy protons

around the Earth. Where the magnetic lines

come out of the Earth at the poles, you have the

polar cusps. Some radiation can get in there –

we see them as the auroras.

A new study shows that the plasma interacts with the magnetic field and it becomes more important when there are solar storms that greatly increase the energy of the radiation coming at earth. The plasmasphere, a portion outside the ionosphere, reacts to greater energies coming from the Sun and will plume out to be more protective. 

All this protection comes from the fact that ions in plasma are charged, and the magnetic field is charged – and like charges repel. So the high speed electrons of the solar wind and the protons and heavy ions of cosmic radiation that come close to Earth are repelled by the magnetosphere, the plasma sphere, and most importantly by the electric field produced by the interaction between the plasma and the magnetic field. The vast majority of charged particles and waves are swept around Earth and merge again safely behind us. Now that’s a force field.

Several research groups have begun to think about how this could be mimicked on a small scale to protect astronauts in space. A 2005 project from NASA contemplated using vectran balloons covered in gold that could be charged to positive or negative values. Placed above a moon base and electrified, the balloons might create a magnetic bubble that would shunt radiation away and produce a protected cavity underneath.

No one has thought more about producing a plasma shield than Dr. Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England. Since 2008 she has been working on producing mini-magnetospheres that would buffer the small amount of plasma in space; using a magnetic field to hold it in place and build up its density. Together, they would produce an electric field just like the Earth does, and this would shunt radiation and particles away from the protected object.

On the left is the Reiner Gamma lunar swirl. On the right is the 

Reiner crater – no, not for Carl Reiner. We used to think 

the swirls (three on the moon) were dead areas, no magnetic 

field, no water, no nothing. Now we see they are the protected 

areas and are the most interesting places on the Moon.

NASA has also thought about this, using a plasma cloud (probably made from hydrogen gas) on the Sun side of a spacecraft, held in place by a superconducting wire mesh. Unfortunately, superconductors only work to produce a magnetic or electric field if below their transition temperature. And even for the best of materials (YBCO and BSCCO) this is somewhere in the range of -265˚F. If the mesh was exposed to the Sun in space, it would be several hundred degrees at least. Better keep thinking.

A discovery in 2013-2014 brought the thinkers back to Dr. Bamford's mini-magnetospheres. It was discovered that small parts of the moon’s surface are protected from radiation. It turns out that these areas produce weak magnetic fields (few hundred nanaoTesla), and those fields are holding the thin plasma of space in place above them. The field concentrates the plasma, and together they produce a protective electric field to deflect particles and keep the surface of the moon at those spots from being irradiated. Irradiation turns the surface dark, while these “lunar swirls” remain light colored.

This is not a cartoon. The pinkish gas is plasma

and on top of the middle cylinder is a magnet. The

magnetic field deflects the plasma and some builds

up in density on the leading edge. This leading edge

and the magnetic field form an electric field that

would shunt more particles. The dark area around

the magnet is a protected cavity, no cosmic radiation

gets to that point. It’s a real-life deflector shield.

Bamford’s discovery of the mechanisms behind the swirls made her idea of a mini-magnetosphere plasma shield more attractive, since the protective magnetic forces on the moon are much weaker than previously estimates had thought necessary. Therefore, a smaller (lighter, less energy consuming) superconducting coil could be used to create a magnetic field and hold a thin layer of plasma in a bubble around a spacecraft. Bamford’s group has built such a force field in their lab and predicts that a 1.5 ton apparatus could do the job in space!

But wait, there’s more. A plasma shield could also protect a ship from high energy weapons. Plasma has the capability to absorb photons of energy like from lasers or phasers!!! And since plasma has to be at a very high temperature to keep the electrons from re-associating with the nuclei, being in space would help since there would be no air to carry the heat away from the plasma. It would stay hot and maintain itself. In fact, incoming weapons fire would reinforce the plasma state by adding energy.

Next week – we need to talk more about shields. We’re building some pretty cool ones on Earth right now. And some using plasma are already here.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Bamford, R., Kellett, B., Bradford, J., Todd, T., Benton, M., Stafford-Allen, R., Alves, E., Silva, L., Collingwood, C., Crawford, I., & Bingham, R. (2014). An exploration of the effectiveness of artificial mini-magnetospheres as a potential solar storm shelter for long term human space missions Acta Astronautica, 105 (2), 385-394 DOI: 10.1016/j.actaastro.2014.10.012

Bamford, R., Gibson, K., Thornton, A., Bradford, J., Bingham, R., Gargate, L., Silva, L., Fonseca, R., Hapgood, M., Norberg, C., Todd, T., & Stamper, R. (2008). The interaction of a flowing plasma with a dipole magnetic field: measurements and modelling of a diamagnetic cavity relevant to spacecraft protection Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, 50 (12) DOI: 10.1088/0741-3335/50/12/124025

Walsh, B., Foster, J., Erickson, P., & Sibeck, D. (2014). Simultaneous Ground- and Space-Based Observations of the Plasmaspheric Plume and Reconnection Science, 343 (6175), 1122-1125 DOI: 10.1126/science.1247212

A Universal Translator By Any Other Name…

Without the Universal Translator (UT) we wouldn’t be celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Star Trek next year. Who wants to watch a TV show where people can’t communicate with one another and can’t figure out what they have in common? You might as well watch family Thanksgiving dinner videos.

Kirk and the Gorn captain were made to “fight it out” by the Metrons. 
Settle your differences man to alien was a big deal on the original 
series. The Gorn were reptile like, and they had similar technology to 
Federation. Notice the silver cylinders, each character has a universal
translator. The Gorn have also been spotted on The Big Bang Theory, 
so their territory is growing.

As a story telling convention, the UT allowed for near instantaneous communication between species that had never met before. With the communication problem solved, the story could move on to conflict resolution and figuring which female alien Kirk was going to kiss.

In the Original Series, the UT was a silver cylinder; you can see the Gorn and Kirk with them in the clip. By The Next Generation, they were incorporated into "com badges." In one episode, Riker and Counselor Troi had them as implants. The Ferengi had them in their ear, an apparently Quark’s had to be adjusted with a Phillips screwdriver every once in a while – although that may have been to remove ear wax.

Humans have about 6000 spoken languages on Earth as of March, 2015 – 6001 if you want to include rap. We're in quite the hurry to build translators that would help us understand one another - anything to avoid years of high school classes that lead to stronger brains but also bad foreign names and poor attempts at cooking.

In some ways, our translators have already passed those of Star Trek, but in others ways we're far behind. Most of our problems have to do with understanding just what things all languages have in common and what things are purely cultural, contextual, and completely without precedent. Let’s take a look at our efforts so far.

If you watched Star Trek, you may already realize the way we have surpassed some of their technology. The UTs of Kirk and Picard were for spoken language only. They still had to keep a crew member as a translator to figure out what signs meant on another ship or how to interpret alien consoles. We already have that licked.

Romulan text is supposedly related in visual character to Vulcan. 
One- someone studies this stuff? Two – I like the color scheme. If 
you came across this screen on a ship’s console, you’d know

it was important – the optical character reader/ translator in Word Lens 
would come in handy here. Three – I find it hard to believe there 
isn’t a Romulan font package you can buy at the App store.

Optical character readers have come a long way in the past few years. We now have cameras and software that can view written words in one language and automatically project them on the screen as translations in another language.

Google has one (Google Goggles, now Google Translate for Android), and there’s an app for that on the iPhone/iPad (called Word Lens, from Quest Visual, bought by Google Translate in 2014, see video below).

And of course we have translators for written words – you type in what you want to say, and the software gives you a reasonable (meh) translation. Try translating a phrase in and out of a language several times and see what you end up with – it’s like a multicultural game of telephone operator.

The latest amazements are the vocal translators, but only for languages we have programmed in. Skype translator was introduced in late 2014. You speak in Spanish or English while having a video chat. On the other end, it comes out in English or Spanish. Why? Because that’s the only translation they offer as of now. How? It's based on speech recognition software. It also gives you a written transcript of the conversation so you can post all the hilarious errors on Twitter (like for autocorrect).

It’s in the vocal translation arena that the Star Trek UT excelled. It was so good it that the TV series just accepted that the translator was there, never broke down, and let us hear everything in English. They didn’t even bother making the aliens’ lips (if they had them) move out of synch with the English translation!

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by one

of Napoleon’s soldiers. It was a decree from 196

BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top is the

decree in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle

is the same decree in Demotic script, and the

bottom is the decree in ancient Greek. Having the

same text in three languages allowed us to decipher

hieroglyphics for the first time.

Most importantly, the Star Trek UT had one feature that none of ours currently do. It could decipher and translate languages that had never been encountered before – like rap.

In principal, the Federation members would have their new alien acquaintances talk into the translator for a while. The device, using deciphering algorithms and the linguacode matrix (invented by an Enterprise linguist), would learn it and then translate it. This seems hinky to me.

Every time a new word was encountered, it would seem to me that the translator would have to either wait till it heard it enough times to decipher its meaning or extrapolate its meaning from context. Neither of these things could occur in real time. It seems to me that the “talk into it” phase would be very long.

Basically, the hardware of a translator is easy. It’s the software that we have to work on. A 2012 paper presented to the Association for Computational Linguistics (yep, just call ‘em the UT geeks) used statistical models to try and train language programs better.

Up to this point in time, vocabulary has been the choke point in trying to speed deciphering and translation. By using the statistical commonalities of all languages (if they can be found and relied upon), the need for so much vocabulary would be eased.

Any of these real-life software algorithms (or the fictional linguacode matrix) will be based on ideas presented in the 1950’s by American linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky and others.

Noam Chomsky was born in 1928, and he hasn’t

been quiet since. He isn’t boisterous by any means,

but he has an opinion he’s willing to debate you on

for just about everything. Linguistics is his game, but

woe is the person who believes he only knows the

structure of language – many a debating opponent

has skewered by his blunt, and ungilded prose/speech. 

Chomsky put forth the hypothesis that all languages had universal similarities. He claims the existence of a biologic faculty in all organisms of high brain function that exists for innate language production and use; basically he’s saying the language is genetic. With this approach, it should be possible to write software that could break any language into these similar patterns and then decipher it.

Ostensibly, the more languages that were encountered, the better the UT would work. On the other hand, maybe there’s not a biologic universality to language, but word order is mimicked in all language – how we build a language is universal.

Either one of these scenarios would make it easier for a computer program to take a completely unknown language and put it through algorithms that might discern order and then meaning.

But a recent study is inconsistent with these ideas. According to a 2011 paper in Nature, word order is based more on historical context within a language family than in some universal constant or similarity. They found that many different sentence part combinations, like verb-object (or object-verb) or preposition-noun (or the reverse) for example, are influenced by other structure pairs within the sentence.

One word preceding the other in some languages caused a reversal in other pairs, while the reverse might be true in other language families.  The way that sentence structure via word ordering evolved does not follow an inevitable course – languages aren’t that predictable. Bad news for computer-based word order help.

In 2600 BCE the Indus valley civilization had a

population of over 5 million. Cities have been

excavated and impressive art has been found. The

tile above shows a rhino, polka-dotted at that,

apparently with polish on its toenails. The symbols

above may be a written language. It’s a big deal which

language it might be related to, since Pakistan and

India are still fighting over this region.

It’s a roller coaster ride trying to figure out if computer power is going to solve our UT problems. We were at a low point with the paper above, but in 2009 we got some speed over a hill. In the 2009 paper, a computer algorithm to predict conditional entropy was used in an effort to investigate a 5000 year old dead language.

The Indus civilization was the largest and most advanced group in the 3000 BCE world. Located in the border region of today’s India and Pakistan, they may have had a written language – we can’t tell. They had pictograph carvings, but what they mean is up in the air. There is no Rosetta stone like we found for ancient Egyptian, and no one speaks or reads the Indus now.

The algorithm for conditional entropy is used to calculate the randomness in a sequence of…. well, anything. Here they wanted to see if there was structure in the markings and drawings. The results suggested that the sequences were most like those in natural languages.

But, just to prove it’s never that simple, linguist Richard Sproat (works for Google now) has contended that the symbols are non-linguistic. In 2014, he did his own larger analysis with several different kinds of non-linguistic symbols, and showed that the Indus pictographs fall into the non-linguistic category.

He rightly points out that computational analyses have a downfall in that biases could enter based on what type of text is selected and what that text depicts. I don’t think someone could pick up English if all they had to study were shopping lists.

But in other old languages, more progress has been made. One paper used a computer program to decipher and translate ancient language of Ugaritic in just a few hours. They made several assumptions, the biggest one being that it had a known language family (Hebrew in this case). This may not be possible when dealing for the first time with some new alien language.

Picard and Captain Dathon of the Tamarians had to

come to some meeting of the minds in order to survive

the beast on El-Adrel IV. He spoke only in metaphor, a

fact that Picard is slow to pick up on. Me - I just wonder

how Dathon didn’t drown when it rained. By the way, you

can get a T-shirt with just about any of Dathon’s sayings.
image credit - It's All About: Star Trek

They also assumed that the word order and alphabet usage frequencies would be very similar between the lost language and Hebrew. They then played these assumptions off one another until they came upon a translation. Ugaritic was deciphered by brute human force a while back, but it took many people many years to do it. This is how we know that the computer algorithm got it right – it just took 1/1000 of the time.

But, even if we find universalities in language, the computer won’t be enough. An example comes from Star Trek itself, in an episode of ST:TNG called Darmok. The universal translator told Picard exactly what the aliens were saying, but it didn’t make any sense.

Their language was based on their folklore and history. All their phrases were metaphors of events in their past. So unless the UT knew this species’ particular history, it could only translate the words not the meaning. Language is more than words in an order; language is the collective mind of a group connecting them to each other and to their world.

Next week, deflector shields.

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Sproat, R. (2014). A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems Language, 90 (2), 457-481 DOI: 10.1353/lan.2014.0031

Dunn, M., Greenhill, S., Levinson, S., & Gray, R. (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals Nature, 473 (7345), 79-82 DOI: 10.1038/nature09923

Rao, R., Yadav, N., Vahia, M., Joglekar, H., Adhikari, R., & Mahadevan, I. (2009). Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script Science, 324 (5931), 1165-1165 DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391

Snyder, Benjamin, Regina Barzilay and Kevin Knight (2010). A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2010