Rorschach Tests for Other Minds

Rorschach Tests for Other Minds

The humans have launched a few ships to the stars, from Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2 to some others… They are all backward and primitive craft, moving, compared to the immense interstellar distances, with the slowness of a race in a dream….

But in the future we will do better and our ships will travel faster and faster. Today, our technology is utterly incapable of such grand interstellar voyages, at least in reasonable transit times. But our computers can be taught the three-dimensional positions of all the nearby stars, and we can ask to be taken on a little trip – a circumnavigation of the collection of bright stars that constitute the Big Dipper, say – and watch the constellations change.

We connect the stars in typical constellations, in the usual celestial follow-the-dots drawings. As we change our perspective, we see their apparent shapes distort severely. The inhabitants of the planets of distant stars witness quite different constellations in their night skies that we do in ours – other Rorschach tests for other minds.

Perhaps sometime in the next few centuries a spaceship from Earth will actually travel such distances at some remarkable speed and see new constellations that no human has ever viewed before – except with such a computer.

Other Rorschach tests for other minds… Image : © Megan Jorgensen