Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Major Martian to Ground Control

A puzzle in honor of the epic landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover — and the friends we may make along its way.

February 21, 2021 at 1:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Our robot-diplomat arrives.
Photo Illustration: Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Countless eyes watched transfixed last Thursday as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down safely on Mars. It was an extraordinary moment, the culmination of a 203-day, 293 million-mile flight preceded by years of scientific and engineering effort, made all the more difficult by the Covid-19 pandemic.5

The Martians seemed to be impressed, too — or at least that was the early conclusion of our crack team of alien-life experts here at Conundrums. But there’s a problem: Our newfound friends are having trouble figuring out how human languages work.