First Contact How Could We Possibly Talk With Aliens
BY Brent Swancer
Ever since we as a species have become aware of other stars and planets beyond our own
we have let our imaginations run wild with what might lie out there or if we really are
alone in the universe upon this spinning rock we call Earth.
Are there other creatures or beings inhabiting other stars, and if so we will we ever see
them or even talk to them?
These are the dreams of our kind, the questions that still loom large across the landscape
of our psyche.
Is there someone else out there?
Further adding to our questions is if there was some other race out there, and we did
actually manage to make contact with them across the sea of stars, what would they be
like?
Would we be able to talk to these alien visitors and perhaps more importantly, what would we
say?
The conundrum of how we would communicate with extraterrestrials has in recent years
been seriously considered, and despite all of the very smart people working on it we
are mostly still left in the dark and unprepared for what talking to an alien might actually
be like.
If aliens were to come down and greet us, say, tomorrow, we would likely immediately
be faced with numerous challenges even beyond language, such as culture, customs, ways of
thinking, and even possibly a different concept and perception of reality itself.
We might not even recognize them as any type of life as we know it.
But if we were to assume that we could just start talking, there would be several potential
obstacles right off the bat, not the least of which is that our bodies would likely be
completely different, and this could have a lot of possible repercussions.
For one, since language is a representation of our thoughts, which are largely based in
how we perceive and interact with the world, human languages reflect the concepts of our
senses of sight, smell, touch, and other cues from our physical form, our shared evolution
and physical actions and reactions such as laughter or crying.
What then happens if an alien race has no eyes or ears or mouth, or experiences the
world in a totally different way?
What if they do not have the same physical relationship with their as we do with our
own?
What if they don�t laugh or cry, or emote as we do?
They may have no understanding at all of what our concepts of perception are in the first
place, a totally different way of experiencing and thinking about time and reality, and so
this would reverberate throughout their whole way of thinking and communication, and indeed
their very being.
This was all rather well-explored in the film Arrival, in which a team of linguists is tasked
with deciphering the mysterious language of a decidedly non-humanoid species with a very
different language and view of time and space, and within the understanding of which hangs
the balance of our survival.
Even within human languages here on Earth we can see how the effects of our sensory
abilities, our upbringing, and our perceptions of the world around us can change methods
and means of communication.
For instance, deaf people use sign language as a means to communicate when the sense of
hearing is robbed from them.
However, although human languages do all sound very unique and even alien at times, and there
are sign languages and whatnot, they are still based on our shared perception of the universe
through the same common biology, morphology, anatomy, and physiology, and therefore they
follow rules that we can all fathom and which give us at least a chance of reproducing them.
With aliens, all bets would be off.
Another important hurdle with differences in physical form would be how we produce and
detect sounds, and thereby language, in the first place.
For humans we use a vocal tract and our ears, and there is a very finite, set frequency
through which we are able to detect the sounds we utter.
With aliens they would be working with a whole different set of organs, frequencies, and
physiology for speech, that is if they even �spoke� as we know it at all.
Their utterances would possibly be made through strange organs for which we have no close
approximation or even understanding of, would probably be made at frequencies, vibrations,
or cadences that we would not be able to detect or recognize as language, and would be made
through a different atmosphere to make it all even worse.
These would be completely non-human sounds, we may not be able to physically discern the
distinctions they make, and considering that many animals on our very own planet are thought
to be able to speak in language and we are completely in the dark as to what they are
saying, this would likely be even more pronounced in something from out beyond the stars.
Perhaps impossibly, indecipherably so.
Simply put, if we cannot physically detect their sounds and cannot reproduce them, then
vocal communication is virtually impossible.
Let�s say, for argument�s sake, that we can get past these obstacles, and that we
can hear and be heard by each other in a meaningful way.
The problems would still not end there.
The very rules of our language and the way they are laid out are all intrinsically linked
to our biology and mindset as well.
An alien language might not have any of the parts of language that we take for granted,
such as verbs, adjectives, and nouns, would possibly not view things such as cause and
effect or the passage of time the same as us, and would potentially follow certain internal
rules, logic, and structures so different from us that we are unable to even mutually
comprehend them.
We as humans have shared cognition and linguistic structures, basic psychologies, and features,
but aliens cannot be counted upon to do so.
Jessica Coon, a professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal who was consulted
on the film about extraterrestrial communication, Arrival, said of this:
What linguists have discovered about human languages is that even though they can sound
very different from one another and their grammars do show a lot of variation�languages
tend to fall into certain patterns.
Most of the world�s languages fall into one of those patterns or the other.
The variation isn�t completely unconstrained.
Humans seem to be hardwired for this capacity to learn language.
Because it is part of our genetics and part of being human, it�s very unlikely that
other creatures would have the same kinds of constraints or show the same kinds of similarities
that human languages do.
We would just have to hope that we would still be able to recognize patterns and match it
up with we�re seeing.
The notable American linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky has also offered his
thoughts on the inherit linguistic problems with trying to talk with extraterrestrial
beings with which we have no shared cognitive understanding of how language works.
He has said:
If a Martian landed from outer space and spoke a language that violated universal grammar,
we simply would not be able to learn that language the way that we learn a human language
like English or Swahili.
We�re designed by nature for English, Chinese, and every other possible human language.
But we�re not designed to learn perfectly usable languages that violate universal grammar.
The formidable challenge this would present can already be seen even among human languages
here on our own planet, where there are sometimes things we have no word for, or a lack of a
word for something we take for granted.
A tropical people might have no word for �snow,� for instance.
Some remote, isolated languages are so alien to others that they do not even have words,
concepts or phrases for things most speakers of other languages would likely take for granted.
For instance, the Pirah� people of the Brazilian Amazon have no words for counting things.
It is either �one� or �more than one,� that�s it.
They also have no clear words for certain directions such as �left� or �right,�
and this is a daunting challenge to understanding them, even though they are human.
Imagine a completely non-human entity with even more outlandish rules of language and
grammatical idiosyncrasies and you can see how meaningful exchanges could be a problem.
Jesse Snedeker, a Harvard psychologist who studies the development of language in children,
has said of this:
We know that every child can learn every possible human language.
Every child has to have some sort of internal capacity that allows them to learn language.
We have to ask ourselves, �Would we have the capacity to learn alien language, and
would they have the capacity to learn ours?� And different people would give you very different
answers to that question.
On the other hand, there�s the argument that any species that achieves a high level
of technology would necessarily understand certain concepts, so that ought to provide
a basis for at least a limited degree of communication.
This is where we begin to see that all hope is not necessarily lost, and one thing seen
as the key to actually being able to start towards communication with aliens is to find
some commonality to use as a starting point.
A good way to do this would be to have some sort of key, something like the Rosetta Stone,
which helped us to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
This has been an idea tossed around in science fiction before, such as the use of the tones
in Spielberg�s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the use of prime numbers in Carl
Sagan�s book Contact.
If we could have some common frame of reference and somewhere to start, then there is the
chance we could work towards further meaningful communication.
One of the best ways of doing this has been seen in recent years as being to use mathematics
or scientific information such as physics as a sort of �universal language� and
starting point.
After all, as the laws of physics and reality are the same throughout the universe, then
it stands to reason that any advanced society would have a grasp of these things in a similar
way, regardless of how we ultimately think about them or express them in language.
No matter what our physiological differences or deviations in ways of looking at the world
and universe, physics are the same everywhere, and so would be a commonality we could use.
Carl DeVito, an emeritus faculty member in the mathematics department at the University
of Arizona in Tucson, believes that although this exchange of scientific information is
perhaps the key to communication with aliens, it nevertheless still faces some challenges.
First is that the idea that it is still reliant on understanding the aliens� systems of
measurement, as well as relying on the supposition that they can count and do arithmetic as we
do, that they recognize the same elements of the periodic table, that they have adequately
studied the different states of matter, and that they know enough chemistry to carry out
chemical calculations in the same way we do.
He also points out that even though the physics would be the same, these extraterrestrials
might calculate their rules of motion and mechanics based on their own unique geometry.
DeVito has said of this:
The mathematics of motion is differential calculus.
Can we assume that an alien race shares this with us?
Differential and integral calculus are so fundamental in so many areas of science that
it is hard to imagine a science without them.
But this is, perhaps, a human bias.
We, of course, can�t know, but we must be aware that the physics of an alien race, even
in a fundamental area like mechanics, might differ in subtle but important ways from our
own.
Using mathematics and physics is nevertheless still seen as a potential way of breaking
through our communication barrier, to the point that it is used by those organizations
seeking to reach out and make contact, such as SETI.
However, even if we can express simple messages to each other with math, there are still the
intricacies of culture and thinking that would shape how messages and ideas are expressed
and interpreted.
Doug Vakoch, the president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, METI, and respected researcher
of xenolinguistics, has said of this conundrum thus:
If they can build spacecraft to come to come to Earth, they have to have an understanding
of good engineering, physics, science, math.
But doing the nitty-gritty work of going back and forth and making guesses at what an alien
says, trying to interpret swirls and determining a sentence or concept?
It�s hard.
Conveying matters.
You need flexibility of language with its infinite combinations.
Our art and culture � that�s all from language, that�s not from just raw numbers.
In addition to the promise of using math, there is also the hopeful fact that it is
possible that the alien�s psyches and physicality are not as different from our own as we may
think after all.
For instance, on our own planet we can see vastly different organisms that have nevertheless
developed strikingly similar ways of dealing with the environment and world around them,
such as evolving eyes, ears, legs, wings and similar organs separately across species,
often evolving independently or sometimes the same structures multiple times, all in
the process called �convergent evolution.�
Perhaps in other areas of the universe extraterrestrials have evolved similarly enough to ourselves,
especially an intelligent tool-using one that would have developed communication and technology
in the first place, that our mental architectures and languages are not necessarily mutually
unintelligible.
This theory postulates that there are enough universal elements to how we think and evolve
to certain environmental challenges that this would be enough solid ground for us to delve
into a basic framework from which further communication would be possible.
Making this even more promising still is that with all of the broadcasts we have spewed
out into the stars the aliens would potentially have a good enough sampling of our languages
and communications to make talking between us easier without having even met us yet,
a possibility of which Coon has said:
If you have enough information and enough of the context and the history, I think there�s
hope that even without a lot of interaction you could be able to make at least significant
progress in understanding the grammar of a language�again depending on how likely we
are to be able to understand alien life at all.
I wouldn�t be surprised at all if creatures who could make giant spaceships that just
show up on Earth could easily figure out our languages from the many broadcasts we put
into outer space, and that we might be able to do the same thing with sufficient resources
and sufficient information.
One thing that is worth considering is that even if we overcome all of these considerable
challenges and are able to communicate, look at us here on Earth.
With our different cultures, ways of thinking, values, and linguistic nuances, even communication
between us humans can be confusing and difficult, with misunderstandings and gaffes commonplace.
How can we hope to resolve these issues with an alien civilization from another star?
In the end, we just don�t know.
Since we have never made contact with aliens, at least as far as we know, there is no precedent
for it, and we cannot possibly know what to expect when such a day comes to pass.
It is impossible to know what form these beings will take, how they will think, or how they
will communicate.
Will it come easy or will we forever remain closed behind mutual doors of incomprehensibility?
The answers remain complex, it is all left entirely to speculation and the imagination,
and we will only know when we finally make that first contact we have always dreamed
of.
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