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To start his sophomore course, Hogben goes back again to the early days of human intellectual development. The first body of scientific knowledge that most cultures accumulated was data on the calendar (the apparent motion of the sun) and on the motion of the planets. So human astronomers should first work out the dates of such events as they are experienced on Mars. Sent across space in the language of numbers as "interplanetary news items," they should be easily recognized by the Martians.
As the interplanetary language develops, whole new topics of conversation will gradually open up. The subject of chemistry can be broached through the numerical properties of the spectra of stars. When the language can cope with anatomy, earthlings will learn what the Neighbors look like. At last, when interplanetary chatter becomes commonplace, individual humans should be able to make friends with individual Martians. They can compare their rhythms of life and death. They can even compare their respective intelligence by playing "celestial chess" across the emptiness of space.
*Hogben is also famous in England as an extreme example of the peculiar professor, who forgets his own birthday and talks indistinctly, with his eyes shut tight. This sort of thing has attracted the attention of the bobbies. During a recent trial, when Hogben was acquitted of drunken driving, a friendly colleague testified: "There is no other man I know more likely to be mistaken for a drunken man when he is quite sober."