Alien language: If we met extraterrestrials, could we talk to them? - BBC Future
Alien language: If we met extraterrestrials, could we talk to them? - BBC Future
Alien lifeforms are likely to have evolved their own unique ways of communicating, so how might humanity communicate with them if ever make contact?
I find it frustrating that we don't give animals more focus in this whole discussion. Like, I get it, aliens are cool, if we ever find some, and we want to be broadcasting to those potential aliens. But it kind of feels like a bad joke when we can't even properly communicate with creatures living right in our houses.
The barrier with animals is having an actual vocabulary. They can convey their current demeanor - like it's generally not hard to tell the difference between a dog wanting cuddles vs wanting to rip your face off. Some of them can even get a little more advanced with things like ringing a bell to tell you that want to be let outside, or bringing you an empty food bowl to tell you they're hungry, but that's kinda it. They don't have a specific bark-word for "Food bowl" or w/e for us to be able to translate.
Couple of exceptions though:
Some of the smarter breeds of parrots can develop a limited working vocabulary. You might be interested in Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a researcher who did a lot of work with parrots. It's pretty well established that you can train a parrot to say "green!" when you point to something green, but Irene wanted to show whether they actually understand that that color IS green, or if they just know they can a treat for saying "green" when their owner points at something that happens to be green. And it's the former - she was able to show they actually understand the concept of color + words that represent specific colors.
I think similar work has been done with apes by teaching them some sign language.
But even with the couple examples of animals being able to learn an actual vocabulary, you still wouldn't be able to have any kind of conversation with them outside of those super basic exchange like "What color?" "Green!" "Good boy!" *treat*.
So back to aliens - specifically aliens capable of space travel - it's a pretty safe assumption that they'd have some kind of language as advanced as our own, if not moreso. The societal development that would need to happen before them achieving space travel would absolutely require language.
Sure, but I do think, there's quite a number of animals with some form of vocabulary, like songbirds, whales, dolphins. To some degree, we do understand these, but there's still huge amounts of vocabulary we haven't deciphered, nor can actually respond to/with.
And even if those are basic exchanges, I feel like we could learn a ton about the different forms of communications and where our limitations are. Like, ants communicate with pheromones and bees with dances. Ultimately, we'd likely still send out EM-waves, simply because they travel quite well through space, but maybe a bee/alien would think our attempt at an obvious encoding is just background noise.
There may be more people working on it than you realize. The International Bioacpustics Conference (IBAC 2023) just ended a couple days ago. It was my first time attending, and I was blown away by how many people are tackling this exact issue from such a wide range of angles. The potential breakthroughs that may be just around the corner thanks to machine learning is what inspired me to start this community. I am constantly amazed by the things that have already been discovered in this field.
Yeah, I guess, I was also specifically complaining that they're not put into the limelight as much, so that folks from outside the field (like me) hear much about it. It always feels like I have to actively research to know what state-of-the-art is. Meanwhile, this news outlet is apparently doing an alien week.
I guess, I'm mostly just tired from how much limelight aliens are getting. But I also guess, broadcasting is basically the only useful thing we can do with potential aliens, so maybe this is the wrong tree to be barking up...
we don't give animals more focus in this whole discussion.
Sir, do you think dogs, cats, mouses, dolphins or whatever have a potential to invent such technology that would allow space travel? Or is your point that rat's IQ is basically the same as human's IQ?
No, my point is that we're struggling with simplistic communication with readily available creatures. Maybe we should practise more with those, before we try to communicate arbitrarily complex ideas with creatures no one has ever seen.
If the core system used were not significantly different than humans, then likely yes (even if our anatomy didn't allow us to speak to them, we could have a shared communication system).
The core system here is Saussure's idea of sign and signifier, ultimately. The medium doesn't matter nearly as much.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir does a great job at hypothesizing a first interaction like this.
Probably, especially because intelligent creatures can gesture to something, make the sound it is, and convey thats what we call it.
I remember reading a sci fi novel a long time ago where mankind encountered a spider-like intelligent lifeform with an unusual method of communication. Wrapped around the creature's head is some type of organ which displays changing bands of light forming a kind of language. Instead of telling someone something they can show them instead.
I wish I knew the book and author. I feel like it could have been in either Clarke's Rama series or Varley's Gaea trilogy.
Rama definitely had octospider robot creatures that communicated with patterns of light on their skin, kind of like cephalopods iirc, but the 90’s were a while ago and I can’t remember many details. Wasn’t Dr. Blue a spiderbot with a ‘speech impediment’ where he could only display blue, or something like that?
You remember it better than I do!
That was Rama, yeah.
Reminds me of the cuttlefish robot that was able to go back and forth tricking a real one into treating it like a male and female by changing its color patterns.
I was just listening to this podcast and the woman being interviewed, Sylvia Earle, said that according to Edith Widder, a bioluminescence specialists, light signals are the most common type of communication on the planet due to all the animals using it in the ocean. I would have never guessed that.