At one time, the US electricity grid ran mostly on coal.

But coal-fired power plants have steadily been decommissioned. Power producers found the plants were too expensive to operate and carried risks tied to toxic air pollution, waste and climate-warming emissions.

Then President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year with a fresh zeal to revive the coal industry. His Department of Energy invoked emergency powers to force utilities to keep old plants operating.

Not only is this bad policy, it’s also a misuse of a law designed for wartime, according to legal scholars and analysts. If allowed to stand, this poses problems for utilities, grid operators and regulators who plan for decades-long timeframes, only to be overruled by short-term political imperatives that favor certain industries.

“It’s just illegal,” said Alexandra Klass, a professor at University of Michigan Michigan Law School, about the emergency orders. She served in the Biden administration as a deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy.

Environmental advocates and state officials have challenged the orders in court, with cases underway in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

I’m focusing on the emergency orders because I don’t think the public grasps how much these actions undermine the principles of utility planning and regulation, with harmful consequences for consumer bills and the climate.

While the Trump administration props up coal, it aims to slow the deployment of clean alternatives with actions such as a stop-work order on offshore wind and slow-walking permits to build onshore wind.

Klass co-authored a new essay with Dave Owen of UC Law San Francisco in the Michigan Law Review Online that examines the history and current use of presidential emergency powers on energy.

The Department of Energy under President Donald Trump is invoking Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, a provision first used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to meet electricity demand in the Southeastern United States in the run-up to US entry into World War II. The idea was that the government needed the ability to step in to meet short-term needs when existing regulations failed to do so.

The government issued 23 orders under Section 202(c) during the 1940s and almost none in the decades that followed.

In the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, the Department of Energy used the power 12 times in response to requests from utilities or grid operators, usually for permission to operate plants briefly in excess of emissions limits.

Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has used this power differently, seemingly to benefit coal producers by preventing coal plants from closing. The key difference is that this latest wave of orders, starting in May 2025 with the JH Campbell plant in Michigan, was not sought by plant owners.

“What the administration is doing now is using these 202(c) orders to basically override all of the long-term resource adequacy and grid planning that states, regional transmission organizations and utilities do,” Klass said. “And this is now coming in saying, ‘We don’t care what any of you experts and planners have to say. We want to save the coal industry, and we’re going to use this emergency authority that’s not designed for long-term resource planning.’”

Consumers Energy, the utility that operates JH Campbell, had planned to close the plant and replace it with a less-expensive combination of a natural gas plant and renewables that already were online.

Think of this in terms of the car you drive. You bought a new car and then the government says you need to keep your old one and continue driving it, even if it’s spewing black smoke and costs more to run than your new one.

The JH Campbell plant, opened in 1960, has a summer generating capacity of 1,331 megawatts. In 2024, it emitted 8.9 million tons of carbon dioxide, ranking 19th among US power plants, based on an analysis of federal Energy Information Administration data.

It got its fuel last year from the country’s two largest coal mines by production, North Antelope Rochelle Mine and Black Thunder, according to regulatory filings. Both are based in Wyoming and they are owned by Peabody Energy and Core Natural Resources, respectively.

James Grech, Peabody’s CEO, is also the chair of the Department of Energy’s National Coal Council. Jimmy Brock, Core’s CEO, is the vice chair. The Trump administration reconstituted the council last year after it had lapsed under the Biden administration. It was founded during the Reagan administration and advises the secretary of energy on policy, technology and markets.

I reached out to Peabody and Core and did not receive an immediate response.

Since ordering JH Campbell to remain open, the Trump administration has issued orders for five other plants: Eddystone in Pennsylvania, Centralia in Washington, RM Schahfer and Culley in Indiana and Craig Station in Colorado. All run on coal except for Eddystone which runs on natural gas and oil.

And, the administration may just be getting started.

“I think as part of the national energy emergency which President Trump has declared we’ve got to keep every plant open,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last month in an interview with Bloomberg News. “And if there have been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back on.”

For context, the country has 169,417 megawatts of coal-fired power plants.

Of that total, 40,784 megawatts have retirement dates listed by the EIA. More than half of that total is set to shut down before 2029 and would be caught up in a policy barring the closure of any coal plant on Trump’s watch.

While the administration can slow the decline, coal’s long-term retreat is near-inevitable. As recently as 2005, the country generated at least half of its electricity from coal-fired power plants. The share plummeted to a low of 15 percent in 2024, then rebounded slightly to 17 percent in 2025.

For coal power to make a sustained comeback in this country, developers would need to start building new plants. The best possibility right now may be the Terra Energy Center in Alaska, a proposal to build a 1,250-megawatt coal-fired power plant that would be the first of its kind in the United States since 2013. But this kind of project is speculative, and it’s not yet clear that it will find the right combination of financing and reliable coal supply.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had said the emergency orders are necessary to keep electricity reliable and affordable.

“The states that have rushed to close their coal plants have also had rapidly escalating electricity prices,” he said in a Jan. 19 appearance on Fox Business. “Americans don’t like that. President Trump doesn’t like it.”

His comment leaves a lot to unpack for an energy analyst. But rather than go into the reasons electricity prices have risen, which is something Marianne Lavelle and I covered in- depth for ICN last month, I’ll just note that the administration’s policy is making power more expensive.

In a February regulatory filing, Consumers Energy reported that it had spent $290 million to operate the plant since the first emergency order. Of this total, $155 million was offset by revenue from the grid operator, leaving $135 million to be covered by the utility’s customers.

“It’s definitely interfering with the ability of utilities to make sure that they’re able to supply the lowest cost, most reliable energy to their customers, as well as states’ abilities to plan their own generation,” said Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at the think tank Energy Innovation.

If the courts don’t rein in Trump’s use of 202(c), then there is little recourse. Congress could seek to modify the law on emergency powers, but that seems far from likely.

If we want a system in which experts make decisions based on the public interest and economics, then leaders will need to spend the post-Trump years making rules that aren’t so easy to abuse.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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A federal appeals court ruled that New Jersey cannot regulate sports bets on prediction markets because the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has exclusive jurisdiction.

Kalshi, which is registered with the CFTC as a designated contract market (DCM), last year won a preliminary injunction preventing the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement from enforcing a state law against its sports-related event contracts. The injunction issued by a district court was upheld today in a 2-1 decision by judges at the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

The CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction over DCMs under the Commodity Exchange Act, a US law. The question in the Kalshi lawsuit is whether the CFTC's exclusive jurisdiction "preempts New Jersey gambling laws and the state constitution’s prohibition on collegiate sports betting," the appeals court majority wrote. "New Jersey frames the issue broadly (regulating all sports gambling) rather than narrowly (regulating trading on federally designated contract markets)."

Chief Judge Michael Chagares and Circuit Judge David Porter sided with Kalshi in a decision written by Porter, saying that the federal law's text "suggests that the narrow framing is the better reading." It thus "preempts state laws that directly interfere with swaps traded on DCMs. Kalshi’s sports-related event contracts are swaps traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction."

The case began last year after New Jersey sent a cease-and-desist letter to Kalshi, alleging that it was listing unauthorized sports wagers in violation of the New Jersey Sports Wagering Act and the New Jersey constitution. The state's Sports Wagering Act requires licenses to offer sports wagers, and the state constitution prohibits betting on college sports.

"Virtually indistinguishable" from online sportsbooks

Circuit Judge Jane Roth dissented, writing that the Kalshi "offerings are virtually indistinguishable from the betting products available on online sportsbooks, such as DraftKings and FanDuel." Roth recounted looking at the Kalshi page for the Carolina Panthers versus Tampa Bay Buccaneers football game on January 3, 2026, and seeing an extensive list of available bets.

"I could have bet on the winner (game outcome). I could have also bet on whether I believed Tampa Bay would win by more than 2.5 points (point spread), whether the two teams would collectively score 45 or more points (game props), or whether former Tampa Bay wide receiver Mike Evans would score a touchdown (player props)," she wrote.

Online sportsbooks offering similar wagers are regulated by states such as New Jersey, but "Kalshi asserts that it is outside the bounds of state regulation because it does not offer gambling products," Roth wrote. "Instead, Kalshi contends its offered sports-event contracts are swaps, subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC. The Majority agrees, holding that Kalshi’s registration as a DCM and branding of its wagers as sports-event contracts are acts of alchemy that transmute its products from sports gambling to futures trading. I see Kalshi’s actions as a performative sleight meant to obscure the reality that Kalshi’s products are sports gambling. Because Kalshi is facilitating gambling, it can be subjected to state regulation."

This is apparently the first appeals court ruling on the topic, but it probably won't end the ongoing debate about the regulation of sports wagers on prediction markets. As law firm Holland & Knight wrote in February, Kalshi has gotten favorable rulings at the US district court level in New Jersey and Tennessee, but suffered losses in Maryland and Nevada.

"With nearly 50 active cases addressing the oversight of event contracts—involving multiple platforms across jurisdictions from New York to Nevada to Tennessee—courts at every level are now grappling with fundamental questions of federalism, preemption and statutory interpretation," Holland & Knight wrote.

CFTC defends "exclusive" authority

The CFTC filed lawsuits last week against Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois to challenge the states' attempts to regulate prediction markets. “The CFTC will continue to safeguard its exclusive regulatory authority over these markets and defend market participants against overzealous state regulators,” CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said on Thursday. The agency is also seeking public comment on how it should regulate prediction markets, including those related to gaming.

Congress could step in. On March 23, Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Senator John Curtis (R-Utah) introduced legislation to prohibit CFTC-registered entities from listing prediction contracts that resemble sports bets or casino-style games.

“Sports prediction contracts are sports bets—just with a different name," Schiff said. "And yet, these contracts have been offered in all fifty states in clear violation of state and federal law. Rather than enforce the law, the CFTC is greenlighting these markets and even promoting their growth. It’s time for Congress to step in and eliminate this backdoor which violates state consumer protections, intrudes upon tribal sovereignty, and offers no public revenue."

Curtis said he's worried about young people being "exposed to addictive sports betting and casino-style gaming contracts that belong under state control, not under federal regulators. Our bipartisan legislation clarifies regulatory jurisdiction, ensuring that states can maintain their authority over sports betting and casino gaming."

Swaps defined broadly in US law

The 3rd Circuit ruling said the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 amended the Commodity Exchange Act by "adding a new class of futures known as 'swaps' and expanding the CFTC’s exclusive jurisdiction 'with respect to accounts, agreements... and transactions involving swaps or contracts of sale of a commodity for future delivery... traded or executed on a [DCM.]'"

Under the law, swaps include event contracts, judges noted. The Dodd-Frank Act gave the CFTC discretionary power to review and prohibit six categories of contracts if it concludes any violate the public interest. Those categories include gaming contracts. So far, the CFTC "has not yet acted to review or prohibit any sports-related event contracts," the ruling said.

"Congress gave the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over trades on DCMs, provided for continued state regulation of trades conducted off DCMs, and recognized that while event contracts could involve gaming, the CFTC has discretionary power to review and prohibit those contracts," the majority said. "Thus, it was reasonable for the District Court to conclude that Kalshi was likely to succeed in showing that the Act preempts New Jersey law from reaching into Kalshi’s CFTC-licensed DCM to ban sports-related event contracts."

Roth's dissent acknowledged that a plain reading of the US law's "text suggests that Kalshi’s sports-event contracts fit comfortably within the statutory definition" of swaps. "On the other hand, we should not read statutes literally 'if reliance on that language would defeat the plain purpose of the statute,' or would 'def[y] rationality,'" she said. "As New Jersey argues, Kalshi’s proffered definition would likely encompass virtually every kind of wager that could exist, including classic casino games and charity raffles."

The law defines swap to include contracts in which payment "is dependent on the occurrence, nonoccurrence, or the extent of the occurrence of an event or contingency associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence." Roth said that with this expansive definition, "even a bet over the outcome of a friendly neighborhood ping pong match" would qualify.

"Moreover, because the trading of swaps outside DCMs is illegal under 7 U.S.C. § 2(e), any individual who engages in gambling outside of a DCM would commit a felony were we to take the definition of swaps to its logical extreme," Roth wrote. "Congress could not have intended for such a rationality-defying outcome."

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On Friday, the Trump administration released its proposed budget for 2027. The budget blueprint includes significant cuts to NASA, but it targets even more severe limits for other science-focused agencies, with no agencies spared. The document is laced with blatantly political language and resurfaces grievances that have been the subject of right-wing ire for years.

If all of this sounds familiar, it's because the document is largely a retread of last year's proposal, which Congress largely ignored in providing relatively steady research budgets. By choosing to issue a similar budget, the administration is signaling that this is an ongoing political battle. And the past year has shown that, even if Congress is unwilling to join it in the fight, the administration can still do significant damage to the scientific enterprise.

What's proposed?

Nearly everybody is in for a cut. The hardest-hit agencies, like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will see their budgets slashed in half. But even agencies that might be otherwise popular, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is overseen by Trump allies, will see $5 billion taken from its $47 billion budget. Agencies that have seemingly avoided political controversies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), would also see their budgets cut by over half.

In several cases, the cuts will eliminate major programs. For example, the NSF budget for social science research would be zeroed out; the NIH would lose both the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health.

In addition, a couple of topic areas are targeted for cuts in multiple agencies. These include efforts to track and/or limit the impacts of climate change, which are targeted for cuts in a variety of agencies. This is what triggered the cuts at NIST. "The Budget slashes wasteful spending at NIST that has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda," the budget proposal announces. "NIST’s Circular Economy Program exploited grants to universities to push environmental alarmism."

Similarly, programs that tackle disparities due to income or discrimination would also be cut. Even though things like health and environmental disparities based on race have been extensively documented, the budget treats any attempts to study them further or address them as illegal discrimination.

In a number of agencies, the administration is also shifting priorities, most notably in the Department of Energy and the NSF, where AI and quantum technologies are now expected to be major areas of focus. The reasoning behind this is unclear, given that these are already areas where private equity has poured large sums of money. It's notable that, depending on exactly how Congress allocates the budget, these agencies may be able to shift focus to these topics even if they are not explicitly directed to do so by law.

A culture war document

While the numbers next to the dollar signs tell us a lot about the administration's thinking, the document is striking for its over-the-top language. The Office of Management and Budget appears nearly incapable of using terminology like "climate change" or "sustainability." Instead, these topics are consistently referenced with variants of the term "green new scam." For example, in slashing the Department of Energy's science budget, the document says, "The Budget eliminates funding for climate change and Green New Scam research." Similar language features in cuts to NIST and ARPA-E.

The budget also makes some references to yearslong right-wing grievances. Apparently, the Trump administration is still upset that incandescent light bulbs have been replaced—something that dates back to a 2007 law. Yet the 2027 budget is still complaining about an agency that "was responsible for many Green New Scam efforts like research on wind energy and a slew of unpopular regulations harmful to Americans in their day-to-day lives, such as banning gas stoves and incandescent light bulbs." (The gas stove ban hasn't happened.)

Similarly, Anthony Fauci, who retired at the end of 2022, is apparently still influencing budgeting decisions in 2026, as he's cited as contributing to "wasteful and radical" spending at the NIH. The specific radicalness cited includes that "Dr. Fauci also commissioned 'The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2' publication, which was used to discredit and dismiss any assertion that COVID-19 leaked from a lab." It's notable that the virus's natural origins are now widely accepted by the scientific community.

Beyond that, many sections of the document include short lists of grant titles presented as examples of wasteful or radical research. This is a standard tactic that goes back decades; often, the grants are fairly mundane or address issues like health disparities that were priorities for past Republican and Democratic administrations.

What to expect

The new budget is largely a variation on the one Trump had submitted for 2026, which Congress largely ignored. The chance that it will approve the same thing in 2027 seems remote. The only factors that might influence it are that the Republican Party is currently looking to lose control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, meaning this will likely be the last chance the administration has to pass something like this, which may cause it to push harder for its passage. There's also the potential that the political calculus changes as the full economic and budgetary impact of the war in Iran becomes apparent.

That said, the past year has demonstrated that the administration can do a fair amount of damage to science even when Congress keeps funding constant. For example, last year saw NASA waste resources on planning to shut down missions based on the expectation that Trump's budget would pass, only to receive funding to carry on the missions as normal. And the NIH has been changing how it funds many grants, which has meant that it funds far fewer while spending the same amount of money.

So, the degree to which science gets disrupted goes back to the same issue we saw last time: Is it possible for Congress to put enough conditions on the funding to limit the administration's attempts to subvert its intent?

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The Artemis II crew made history as they traveled further from our planet than any other living humans. The astronauts and NASA are making the most of the trip, including by capturing some utterly stunning photos. The space agency shared some that were taken from the far side of the Moon, including the "Earthset" shown above.

This is a depiction of our planet setting behind the Moon, just as the sun sets over the horizon for us on terra firma every single night. "The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon," the NASA Artemis account on X noted. 

The crew also witnessed a solar eclipse from the far side of the Moon, with the satellite totally blocking out the sun. This lasted for around 57 minutes as Orion travelled more than 4,000 miles beyond the Moon. You can see several photos of the eclipse and Earth from the lunar flyby in the slideshow above. (And yes, the astronauts used eclipse glasses to protect their eyes.)

While they were circling the Moon, the Artemis II crew discovered two new craters. The astronauts suggested names for them: Integrity (after the nickname for their spacecraft) and Carroll, after the late wife of Commander Reid Wiseman, describing the latter as a “bright spot on the Moon.” 

The mission will last a few more days as the astronauts are now returning to Earth. Orion is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on April 10.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-shares-incredible-photos-from-the-far-side-of-the-moon-142355972.html?src=rss

The film adaptation of Andy Weir's novel Project Hail Mary hits general release today, March 20, and it's great—go see it! Though a little light on the science, the movie goes hard on the relationship between schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and an extraterrestrial named Rocky, and it's a ride well worth taking.

But as good as it is, the movie shares a small flaw with the book: Despite having very few things in common, Grace and Rocky learn to communicate with each other extremely quickly. In fact, Grace and Rocky begin conversing in abstracts (concepts like "I like this" and "friendship") in even less time than it takes in the book. Obviously, there are practical narrative reasons for this choice—you can't have a good buddy movie if your buddies can't talk to each other. It's therefore critical to the flow of the story to get that talking happening as soon as possible, but it can still be a little jarring for the technically minded viewer who was hoping for the acquisition of language to be treated with a little more complexity.

And because this is Ars Technica, we're doing the same thing we did when the book came out: talking with Dr. Betty Birner, a former professor of linguistics at NIU (now retired), to pick her brain about cognition, pragmatics, cooperation, and what it would actually take for two divergently evolved sapient beings not just to gesture and pantomime but to truly communicate. And this time, we'll hear from Andy Weir, too. So buckle up, dear readers—things are gonna get nerdy.

A word about spoilers

This article assumes you've read Weir's novel and that you've seen the movie. However, for folks who haven't yet seen the film, I don't think there's much to be spoiled in terms of the language acquisition portions that we're going to discuss—the film covers rather the same ground as the book but in a much more abbreviated way.

Still, if you want to avoid literally all spoilers, skip this article for now—at least until you've been to the theater!

The yawning chasm of "meaning"

Dr. Birner's specific field of study is the science of pragmatics. "Pragmatics has to do with what I intend by what I say and what I mean in a particular context," she explained to Ars on a Zoom call earlier this week. She elaborated by bringing up her (nonexistent) cat—the phrase "my cat" can have a multitude of meanings attached, all of which are inferred by context.

If you know Dr. Birner has a cat, her saying "my cat" could refer to that cat; if you know that she doesn't have a cat but used to, "my cat" could refer to that cat instead, even though the semantics of the phrase "my cat" haven't changed. That's pragmatics, baby!

Pragmatics are particularly relevant to the Grace/Rocky language-acquisition problem because the discipline involves the creation of inferences by the listener about the speaker's mental state and about what specific meanings the speaker implies.

But "meaning" is a fraught word here, too, because ultimately we cannot know for certain the exact meaning being implied by another person because we cannot ever truly peek inside someone else's mind. "We are always making guesses about what our shared context is and what our shared cultural beliefs are, and, indeed, what our shared knowledge as members of the species are," Dr. Birner continued. "And I think of this because of thumbs-up/thumbs-down."

Two Eridian thumbs up. Or down! Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

"The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put out a book, boy, back in the '80s," she said. "They talked about all of language as metaphorically built up from embodiment, our embodied experience, and our senses. So we sense up and down, and then we have this whole metaphorical notion of happy is up, so we have a thumbs up, 'I'm feeling up today. I'm just feeling high. My spirits are lifting.'"

"Or, I can be down in the dumps," she said. "I can be feeling low, my mood is dropping, thumbs down,' and there's this whole metaphorical conception. And I loved the way Project Hail Mary played with that in that Rocky didn't share that. Rocky did not have a metaphor of 'happy is up,' the way Lakoff and Johnson would say we all just do."

I asked Dr. Birner if our "up is good, down is bad" association has a biological basis in our cognition or if it's something that has simply been shaped into a broadly shared metaphor over thousands of years of language use, and she took a moment to answer.

"That's a really good question, and I don't remember whether they deal with that," she said. "But I could imagine it being biological because we start as little helpless things that can't even stand up. And soon we stand up, we get taller, we get smarter, we get better and better the taller we get. I can actually very well imagine a biological basis for it."

The first leap—not math, but truth

Let's focus in on some of the specific linguistic mountains Grace and Rocky would have had to climb. The one that struck me as perhaps the most basic would be starting from pantomime and figuring out the most important thing: the twin concepts of yes and no, and the companion dualities of true/false and equal/not-equal. To me, this feels like the most mandatory of basics.

And here, perhaps, we can fall back on some good ol' Sagan—or at least the movie version of Sagan. Dr. Birner and I (along with my colleague Jennifer Ouellette, who also hung around on the Zoom call) went back and forth for some time, but in the end, no one could really figure out a more straightforward way to demonstrate these concepts than the "primer" scene in 1997's Contact, where the unknown alien signal is shown to contain a small grouping of symbols that appeared to represent addition, along with "equals" and "not equals" sign equivalents.

Sagan's <em>Contact</em> leads with a quick remedial math lesson. Credit: Warner Bros.

"That's a good way to go about it, with equivalent and not-equivalent," said Dr. Birner. "So at least you get negation, and now you can work on perceptual oppositions—up and down, black and white, loud and soft. I think that would probably be the jumping-off place for yes and no."

Though there are linguistic biases in English and other human languages that might peek through even here—the inherent tie between "positive" (as in agreement) and "positive" (as in "this thing is good and I like it"). Careful aliens would likely want to spend a fair amount of time interrogating this bias—if it's even visible at this point. And it likely wouldn't be, as we haven't built any of those syntactic bridges yet.

Pidgin? Not so fast

Getting those bridges built—going past "yes" and "no" and into some of the other basics that must be established to communicate—is not straightforward. Grace and Rocky benefit from being in a tightly constrained environment with a set of mutual problems to solve; two humans in a similar situation would likely develop a "pidgin"—an ad-hoc working language cobbled together out of components of both speakers' languages.

But as Dr. Birner points out, true pidgin here is impossible because neither Grace nor Rocky is capable of actually producing the sounds required to speak the other's language in the first place. "They don't actually develop a pidgin," she said. "They each have to learn the other's language receptively, not productively."

Rocky (left) and Grace (right), learning each other's languages. Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

"Which is great," she went on, "because when kids acquire language, it's sort of a truism that reception precedes production. Every kid is going to understand more than they're producing. Necessarily! You can't produce what you don't understand yet. So it makes the problem a little easier for Grace and Rocky—they don't have to produce each other's language, just understand it."

Who is even there?

Grace and Rocky are lucky in that both humans and Eridians are ultimately extremely similar in their cognition and linguistics, even if their vocalizations aren't alike. This means a lot of the mandatory requirements for conversation as we understand them are already present.

"If I encounter Rocky, I need to know, does he have a mind?" she posited. "Does he have what we call a theory of mind? Does he have a mind like mine? And does he understand that I have a mind like his, but separate? Does he understand that I can believe different things from what he believes? Can I have false beliefs? That's all a prerequisite for communicating at all. If your mind and my mind had all the exact same stuff in it, there'd be no need to communicate.

"H.P. Grice said that communication doesn't happen without the assumption that both parties are being cooperative," she said. The word "cooperative" here doesn't necessarily mean that both parties are copacetic—Dr. Birner pointed out that even when people are fighting, they tend to still be cooperatively communicating. There are rules to the interaction that must be followed if one party intends to impart meaning to the other.

Beyond adherence to the cooperative principle, another bedrock of communication is the notion of symbols, the understanding that a word can represent not just an abstract concept but can actually stand in for a thing. "I can use the word mug," explained Dr. Birner, holding up a mug, "and mean this. And you understand what I mean, and I don't have to show you the mug every single time."

Also on the "mandatory" list is an understanding of the concept of displacement, which Dr. Birner attributes to the researcher Charles F. Hockett. "Displacement has long been said to be solely human, though not everyone agrees with that. It's the ability to refer to something that is distant in time or space. I can tell you that I had a bagel this morning, even though I'm not having it right now and it's not present right here. I had it elsewhere and I had it earlier," she said.

She continued: "There's this wonderful article, 1979 by Michael Reddy, called 'The Conduit Metaphor,' where he says that we think in metaphors. And the metaphor he's talking about is that language is a conduit, and we really just pass ideas from my brain to yours. And he says it's a false metaphor. It's clearly not true that that's what happens, but we talk about it as though it does. 'I didn't catch your meaning,' or 'Give that to me again.' We talk as though this is a thing we literally convey, and of course we don't convey meanings. Reddy argues that the vast majority of human communication is actually miscommunication, but so trivially that we never notice."

By way of example, she referenced her nonexistent cat again. "If I mentioned my cat, Sammy, well, you'll have some mental image of a cat," she said. "It almost certainly isn't remotely like Sammy, but it doesn't matter. I don't need to explain everything about Sammy. If I did, the conversation would grind to a halt and you'd never interview me again. Also, I'd be violating the cooperative principle because I would be saying too much for the current context."

Math, the universal language?

It is a common trope in science fiction—and one brought up more than once in the comments on our last article on this subject—that "math is the only universal language." It's a fun, pithy saying that perhaps makes mathematicians feel good about their dusty chalkboards, but at least from my knothole, it's a false generalization because the language in which one does one's mathematics must be settled before any mathing can happen.

"I'm not sure that even is true on Earth," said Dr. Birner about the notion of math as universal grammar. "The concept of zero hasn't always been around, and how much math can you do without zero? There are languages that count, "One, two, three, many," and that's it. And those are human languages. So to say, 'Math is a universal language,' I'm already not totally on board there."

Gosling as Ryland Grace, employing math to save the world. Credit: Jonathan Olley / Amazon MGM Studios

"I think math would help, but I don't think it would get them terribly far because they need the notion of objects. They need the notion of the semiotic function, that things stand for other things." She paused pensively, then went on. "And once they've got that, that there are discrete objects and we both think of the same things as discrete objects, then we can talk about counting those objects and now we're off and running."

Whole-object notion is another oft-overlooked component here—often referred to as the "gavagai problem."

"You're pointing to a rabbit, and you say, 'gavagai!'" said Dr. Birner. "Well, does that mean 'rabbit?' Does that mean 'fur?' Does that mean 'ears?' Does that mean, 'hey look?'"

"Quine's notion is that we default to a whole object. Well, does what counts as a whole object for me count as a whole object for you? Does every conceivable culture have discrete borders on objects?"

The author speaks on human-Eridian similarities

Fortunately for Grace and Rocky, humans and Eridians do have all these things in common because in the universe of Project Hail Mary, the species share a common ancestor.

"Within the fictional context of this story," explained Andy Weir to Ars in an interview, "the natural evolution of life began on planet Adrian in the Tau Ceti system. Then what we can call primordial Astrophage, like an ancestor of Astrophage, caused a panspermia event. It just kind of emanated out from the system and ended up seeding just a few planets."

Author Andy Weir on the <em>Hail Mary</em> bridge set during filming (Weir was a producer on the movie). Credit: Jonathan Olley / Amazon MGM Studios

"That panspermia event was about four and a half billion years ago. It seeded Earth with life. It seeded 40 Eridani—or rather, Erid with life, and maybe others as well. That means everything within a certain radius of Tau Ceti has a decent chance of having been infected with life, and all of that life is related. That's why Eridian cells and Astrophage and human cells all have mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, and ribosomes, and DNA or RNA, and so on."

Weir notes that he worked through a number of the same linguistic issues that Dr. Birner and I raised as part of the story-generation process.

"Let's say you have intelligent life on the planet," he said. "What do you need? What does that species need to have to reach the point where they're able to make spacecraft and fly around in space? Well, first off, you have to be a tribal thing. You can't be loners. You can't be like bears and tigers that don't communicate with each other. You have to have the sense of a community or a tribe or a group or a gathering so that you can collaborate because you can specialize and do all these things. You need that."

"Number two, you need language. One way or another, stuff from my brain has to get into your brain," he said, echoing Dr. Birner's note about Reddy's conduit metaphor paper.

"Number three is you need empathy and compassion. A collection of beings altogether doesn't work unless they actually are willing to take care of each other. And that's not just found in humans—it's found in primates. It's found in wolf packs. It's found in ants. It's like any collectivized species has to have that trait."

"You need to have compassion, empathy, which means putting yourself in somebody else's situation. Compassion, empathy, language, a decent amount of intelligence, a tribal instinct, a group instinct, a society kind of building instinct," he said. "You must, I believe, have all of those things in order to be able to make a spaceship. Any species that's lacking any one of those won't be able to do it. So any alien you meet in space is going to have all of those traits. The Friendly Great Filter is that any aliens you meet, I believe, have to have this concept of society, cooperation, empathy, compassion, collaboration, and so on."

Sexy hero nerd Ryan Gosling, saving the world with his biceps and kind eyes. Credit: Jonathan Olley / Amazon MGM Studios

I'm here for Weir's explanation—it works within the context of the science fiction universe we're being presented, and Rocky and Grace need to be able to talk to each other or we don't have a book (or a film!). But does it ring true under scrutiny? After all, even here on Earth, there is a wealth of problem-solving, tool-using creatures much more closely related than humans and Eridians with vastly different cognitive toolkits. Cephalopods (with distributed nervous systems and pseudo-autonomous arms), corvids, and cetaceans all have their own evolutionary approaches to communication.

"There's a point in the book where Grace says that Rocky is less closely related to him than the trees in his backyard," said Dr. Birner. "Yes, we are family, but the tree in the backyard is more closely related. And I thought, well, let's talk about that tree. Trees communicate. I don't think trees have language. They don't have a displacement, they don't have syntax, they don't have discrete units that can be put together in various ways or replace this unit with that and you've said something different."

"That's all language stuff, but they communicate," she said. "One tree will put out a chemical through its roots that warns another tree or all the local trees about something going on. OK, it's communicative. Is it intentional? I would say no—your mileage may vary—but once you say that I'm closer to that tree biologically than I am to Rocky, even though all three of us came from that same panspermia event, I don't think you can lean on that for saying why it's so easy to communicate with Rocky."

Here, Ars' Jennifer Ouellette made an important point. "Rocky is basically a rock," she said. "He's not a human form, and that's going to affect how a language, if there is one, evolves in that species—and it's really going to impact how they communicate."

"Yes, embodiment is a big deal in communications," replied Dr. Birner, returning to the subject she'd brought up earlier, that the nature of our flesh-prisons inherently shapes not just how we experience the world but how we communicate. Our physical forms are the product of evolutionary pressures—they are the results of the inevitable, inscrutable dialogue between environment and organism. And the evolutionary pressures faced by Homo sapiens on Earth are vastly different from the evolutionary pressures faced by Eridians on Erid, and that same dialog on Erid led to vastly different outcomes.

"You may have heard of this," she said, "Thomas Nagel and his wonderful paper 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?'" (I had not, but Ouellette had—in fact, she'd heard Nagel deliver a lecture on the paper.)

"I can try to imagine what it's like to be a bat," said Dr. Birner, "feeling the air beneath my wings and the sonar, but I'm imagining what it's like to be me being a bat. I can't imagine what it's like for that bat. And to bring it back to even within human beings, I don't know what it feels like to be Lee or Jennifer. I just don't. And even if, Jennifer, we just met, you could tell me, 'Oh, this is how old I am, and I have N kids for some value of N or N partner or whatever, a dog. I love to run in the morning. I have bagels for breakfast. You could go on and on and on, and I will never know what it is like to be Jennifer. And it's such an interesting concept because it really messes with the notion of just what you were saying, Lee: How do you communicate with a mind you can never enter?"

Rocky in all his beautiful glory. Credit: Amazon MGM studios

"And that's where I think that anthropic principle really cheats in most science fiction," she finished up, referring to the principle that we're all here to see a story, and certain things about the aliens need to be true for the story to work. "Because you would have to spend so much of your book describing what it is like to be Rocky—which, again, I'd read that book!—but it wouldn't be a book about saving Erid and saving Earth because you'd need 500 pages just of what does it feel like to be an Eridian. And so what you end up with in both the book and the movie is it seems to feel a lot like being a human, except you've got a harder shell."

Real first contact?

Given all of these factors, including and especially the idea that we can probably rely on a spacefaring technological species to have some of the same cognitive touchstones as humanity but also that "probably" is not "definitely," I asked Dr. Birner how she might proceed if she suddenly found herself tapped to communicate with an alien and how she might know that meaning has been achieved.

She mentioned that for this scenario in Arrival—a film for which she did some consulting—the characters start with trying to establish names, but that naming might not be the right tack.

"There's so much that has to come before that," she said. "I like what Grace did, and I think I would probably do the same thing. Walk to the other end of the cage, see if it follows me. Assuming mobility—a big assumption, but let's assume mobility and assume no obvious face. Let's assume a Rocky-like creature. Will they follow me? That would establish some kind of cooperativity and theory of mind, that we now both think we both have minds."

2016's <em>Arrival</em> goes with a "names-first" approach to linguistic acquisition. Credit: Paramount

"From there, presence of mind and friendly, mutual intent. At that point we go to the semiotic function—do you label things? Do you have things that stand for other things?"

"Grace does this with a clock," I pointed out, "which works out to be probably the smartest thing he could have done because Rocky also has a clock handy and recognizes that that's what it is."

"Yeah, Rocky understands that it's a clock because it's got these little things that go around from image to incomprehensible image," she said, referring to the spinning hands on the clock and Rocky's apparent reasoning process. "I don't know. Again, I'm saying you have to try to think 'what is it like to be Rocky?' Would you know that that's a clock? Maybe you don't measure time with numbers. Are there different measuring systems, some of which use math and some of which don't?"

We pointed out that it's narratively convenient that Eridians seem to use a written number system that employs place value and has a distinct base—and how even on Earth, that's not a given. Many counting methodologies both ancient and modern are not place value systems—how much more complicated the conversation would have been had Grace brought out a clock using Roman numerals instead of Arabic!

Ultimately, as Ouellette then pointed out, any spacefaring entity must have some kind of working concept of space and time (either as the modern linked notion of "space-time" or in the old Newtonian separate mode)—though Weir made the fun choice of having Eridians lack any understanding of relativity.

Friendly aliens

The most dangerous thing about communicating with aliens this way isn't mistaking a word or two—it's the more fundamental problem of what happens to third- and fourth-order assumptions when the foundations those assumptions are built on aren't quite right. Sure, Grace and Rocky can agree that they are "friends," but how do you explain "friend"?

"To be someone's friend can mean a million things," said Dr. Birner. "I have my best friend since high school. I consider you a friend," she said, pointing at me through the screen, "and we've talked three times. My daughter, who's now 35, has turned into my friend. What does that mean?"

Indeed, the notion of "friend" is a rough one—it's fundamental to human interaction, and as such, it carries with it a huge number of (sometimes contradictory) behavioral expectations. When you're explaining "friends" to an alien, how do you paint it? That you and the alien have shared interests and should therefore work together? That you are genuinely interested in the alien's well-being? That you'd make sacrifices for them? That you'd expect them to help you haul furniture when you move?

And what assumptions might you make about the alien's behavior once you'd declared each other "friends"? That they would make sacrifices for you? What if for the alien, the concept they've settled on for "friendship" means they'll pull your limbs off when the adventure is over because that's what friends do in their culture?

"You need societal grouping," I supplied, "but you don't necessarily need friends."

"Absolutely," she said. "And now I'm going to another work from 1982, Maltz and Borker, who looked at kids on the playground, and at that time—I think it's changed a lot, it's been 40-some years!—but at that time, they saw that little girls had a horizontal set of relationships. It was all friendship-based and secrets-based, and you have your best friend and then your next best friends. And little boys had a hierarchy, and your whole goal was to get higher in the hierarchy by insulting the kids above you and whacking them and try to be king of the hill."

"Get the conch," I joked unhelpfully.

"Yeah, exactly—get the conch. Again, cultural knowledge."

Thumbs up! Or down!

Realistically, it's hard to see two creatures like Grace and Rocky so quickly managing to progress from pointing at objects to communicating about complicated emotional abstracts. Dr. Birner readily conceded that it would be easiest for two beings in a Grace-n-Rocky situation to build a small shared technical vocabulary out of pantomime, pointing at things, and other easily demonstrable physical concepts (and, indeed, this is how they start their communication). But the leap from demonstrables to abstracts is fraught.

Even the fact that Eridian language seems to more or less be human language wearing different pants doesn't necessarily help us much. It makes it easier for the mechanics of communication to occur—Grace and Rocky easily grok that each other's language has a definable syntax, expressed through the arrangement of chunked human words or the continuous sets of overlapping Eridian tones—but divining the true biologically freighted meaning of those messages grows increasingly uncertain the farther they get from physical demonstrations.

We are all slaves to our perceptions, and our languages and the meanings we aim at rest upon biological and sociological foundations that would be terribly difficult to convey to an alien with just a few weeks of focused effort.

But again, that's not necessarily good buddy-movie storytelling, is it? It's perhaps realistic, but it would make for a very different tale than the star-saving adventures of Grace and Rocky.

Which, by the way, are excellent. You've stuck with me through four thousand words of linguistic bloviating—and I have much more, with plenty more details, in the first piece from a few years ago! And if I can count on your attention for just a few more words, it would be to entreat you to go see Project Hail Mary. It is a fantastic film with a charming duo at its core—and even if the linguistics invite a lot of critique, it's all coming from a place of love.

Even if Rocky doesn't quite understand how hugs work. It's OK. He figures them out.

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Comments

A customer reported a problem with a system header file. When they included ole2.h, the compiler reported an error in oaidl.h:

    MIDL_INTERFACE("3127CA40-446E-11CE-8135-00AA004BB851")
    IErrorLog : public IUnknown
    {
    public:
        virtual HRESULT STDMETHODCALLTYPE AddError( // error here
            /* [in] */ __RPC__in LPCOLESTR pszPropName,
            /* [in] */ __RPC__in EXCEPINFO *pExcepInfo) = 0;
        
    };

The error message is

oaidl.h(5457,43): error C3927: '->': trailing return type is not allowed after a non-function declarator
oaidl.h(5457,43): error C3613: missing return type after '->' ('int' assumed)
oaidl.h(5457,43): error C3646: 'Log': unknown override specifier
oaidl.h(5457,43): error C2275: 'LPCOLESTR': expected an expression instead of a type
oaidl.h(5457,43): error C2146: syntax error: missing ')' before identifier 'pszPropName'
oaidl.h(5459,60): error C2238: unexpected token(s) preceding ';'

The compiler is seeing ghosts: It’s complaining about things that aren’t there, like -> and Log.

When you see the compiler reporting errors about things that aren’t in the code, you should suspect a macro, because macros can insert characters into code.

In this case, I suspected that there is a macro called AddError whose expansion includes the token ->.

The customer reported that they had no such macro.

I asked them to generate a preprocessor file for the code that isn’t compiling. That way, we can see what is being produced by the preprocessor before it goes into the part of the compiler that is complaining about the illegal use of ->. Is there really no -> there?

The customer reported back that, oops, they did indeed have a macro called AddError. Disabling the macro fixed the problem.

The compiler can at times be obtuse with its error messages, but as far as I know, it isn’t malicious. If it complains about a misused ->, then there is probably a -> that is being misused.

The post Learning to read C++ compiler errors: Illegal use of <TT>-></TT> when there is no <TT>-></TT> in sight appeared first on The Old New Thing.