Assuming that extra-terrestrial species of intelligent life exist and are capable of communicating with us, would it be possible to establish some form of communication with them? If so, how would we do this? In direct interactions among individuals, it isn’t too hard to puzzle out a basic standard for communication. After all, peoples with different languages have been able to communicate with one another for millennia. In face-to-face interaction, there are cues of body language, tone of voice, gestures, and so forth to rely on. This isn’t so say that these cues couldn’t be misinterpreted, but it’s much easier to correct misunderstandings when the communication is in person.
However, remote communication is a different matter entirely. You only the communicated message itself, with no other cues to orient it. I remember in a certain Isaac Asimov story that I read years ago (the title escapes me at the moment, unfortunately), Terrans established communications with the inhabitants of Jupiter through a language of radio clicks. This fascinated me, since I wondered how they’d established the rudiments of communication in the first place. How would one make it clear that a message is being communicated, and how would the receiver figure out how to respond in a way that will be understood by the original sender? How does one signify that the original message may have been misunderstood, since the receiver replied in a way that was inappropriate or incorrect?
Personally, I don’t see how it could be done, but I thought that if anyone could solve this little puzzle, they’d be lurking about somewhere here.
Well, the Voyager spacecraft has an attempt. But otherwise, I think one of the things we look for in determining if incoming signals are from intelligent beings is the presence of patterns related to mathematics, the rationale being that the rules of math are the same throughout the universe and therefore be the single common “language.” What happens after we’ve positively established contact? Beats me.
Mathematics is the answer. Now I am no expert by any stretch but it would seem to me that the basic formula of mathematics is the same no matter where you go. so if you want to say “hello” to the first ET that you meet you better be good with numbers.
I would suggest actually reading the book CONTACT by Carl Sagan (or if you are too lazy rent the movie with Jodie Foster).
I remember reading somewhere, and I hope that someone can fill in the gaps here, but almost any language canbe broken down into mathematics of one kind or another.
Well, sending out groups of pulses corresponding to the prime numbers seems like a good idea of establishing contact. Pulsars, the only natural thing we know of that can produce a regular pulsed radio signal (hence the name, eh? :)), do not do that, and if a planet is doing it, you can bet life intelligent enough to know, well, at least the prime numbers and radio :), has evolved there. Evidence points to intelligent life being rather rare in this galaxy, so two sentient species should want to establish contact for curiosity’s sake. Let’s hope ETs see things the same way.
And knowing the prime numbers is no mean feat: Having a mathematics complex enough to define and then find prime numbers means you can do all sorts of really neat things, like number theory and calculus. Primes are just a very visible, recognizable tip of a huge conceptual iceberg.
I recall a quote that I think was from Carl Sagan that was something along the lines of:
“Any alien that we ever came in contact with is likely to be so far advanced from us that their talking to us would be like our trying to talk with cows.”
I think he was referring to direct contact.
BTW, I did a google search to try and nail down the quote but all I came up with was thousands of cattle mutilation stories (any search with ‘alien’ and ‘cow’ has a tendency that way).
SETI certainly thinks that contact and communication will be possible. There’s a short paper on the history of ideas about how to send messages here: http://www.seti.org/science/signals.html. Early ideas for communicating with aliens on the Moon included clearfelling large areas of Siberian forest to demonstrate Pythagorean theorem.
They’ve also thought about the dangers of doing so. Their position paper on initiating communication with extraterrestrials is here: http://www.seti.org/iaa-position-paper.html
This is a hijack but it’s something that has always been on my mind.
Why the heck do we want to reach out and search for aliens? Any extraterrestial species that are ahead of us in technology are probably going to enslave or kill us.
Think of what we’d do if we had found a lower civilization species on some other planet. We’d start by trying to study them, then exploit them, then colonize the planet, then finally kill them all and move there as we gradually pollute and destroy our own planet.
Some of you might be benign yourself, but different nations and even religious groups are going to try and assert themselves right from day one. And God forbid if the alien species were all converted to … some religion or other.
I agree with the “mathematics as universal language” idea.
My applied maths lecturer once suggested drawing a triangle and labelling 2 sides and all 3 internal angles and then allowing the aliens to show how to solve the 3rd side as a starting point for “conversation”
Prime numbers are also a good way to get their attention (via radio broadcasts) as well as perhaps the Fibbonaci series as well.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before but why don’t we just borrow one of Starfleet’s Universal translators then we can converse normally with all of the species that we make contact with. When searching this one tonight I came up with proof that StarFleet REALLY exists.
I read a story once where a group of ethnologists were trying to decode the written language of a long dead alien race. Basically they were in a position similar to early Egyptologists, but with no rosetta stone. Their first major success came from viewing a periodic table, which instantly gave them the names of the elements and basic subatomic particles. From there they went on to decode the names of chemical compounds simply by following written reactions through. The amount that could then be decoded was enormous.
I imagine the same would be possible with an alien similar to ourselves. Draw up a periodic table complete with electron configuration and any civilisation capable of space travel will be able to recognise it and translate the words for all the elements. From there they can decode that hydrogen oxide is also water, ferric oxide is rust and that glucose is sugar. They can also decode what basic chemistry terms like oxidation, reduction, energy, emmited photon/light That should be sufficient shared language to allow us to completely decipher each other’s languages.
This of course assumes that your aliens can succesfully decode your encrypted periodic table and reproduce it. If you really are left with binary clicks then even drawing triangles will be impossible.
I suppose in that situation you could transmit simple patterns such as 1+1 = 2 and let them decipher the =. From there you could move on to 3x3=9 and so on. It would be possoble in this way to for a clever person eventually decode all the mathematical symbols and so have the beginnings of a common lnguage, but it would take a long time.
It’s most unlikely that any civilisation with which we made contact would be close enough for proper two-way communication, let alone popping over for a visit, but IMHO the motivation for looking is the same as the motivation behind Artificial Intelligence research and communication with Ddolphins/chimps etc. - Humans love to communicate; the idea of discovering an entirely new type of mind is simply too attractive to ignore.
I think it’s a bit disappointing (albeit necessary) that the communication with alien civilisations would be (initially at least) math-based; I want to know abouttheir views on the nature of existence and the universe, their lives, their hopes, their personalities - stuff like that.
One thing that no one’s brought up yet is the simple problem of different brain structures. We may not be capable of thinking in ways similar to an alien species, which I imagine would limit the potential for meaningful conversation. The “trying to talk to cows” analogy is apt, because there is no hope for a meaningful and intellectual dialogue with a cow. We’re too different.
I thank everyone for their input so far. I’m not a mathematically-minded person (being a history/philosophy/theology major), so the mathematical solution didn’t immediately recommend itself to me. I know just enough math from calculus 1 to know that you can do some really nifty things with math, but it didn’t occur that communicating with extraterrestrials would be one of them. Once the suggestion had been made, it seemed obvious, of course.
I think that Enola Starlight’s response has come closest to what I orginally had in mind. Forgive me for not making my question clearer in the OP, but allow me to clarify now. The concerns about being able to hold a dialog at such a distance, and whether we ought to in the first place are certainly valid, but I think that they might be subjects for threads unto themselves. Assuming that it is possible and desirable to establish contact, how would we work our way up from the first contact up to the point where we could conduct conversations? Would it be necessary to use some sort of visual medium to convey the basic building blocks (like those in Enola’s schema)? Enola’s method seems extremely effective if those receiving the mesage can see the information we are sending them. Can you adequately explain a periodic table without being able to draw it?
The concern Beelzebubba raised seems especially pertinent now that I think about it. (Great handle, by the way. You’re not a fan of the Dead Milkmen, are you?) We run into some real problems if the organisms receiving our communications aren’t your standard Star Trek “humans with funny faces” brand of alien. Do we run into an insurmountable problem if the race with which we are trying to communicate has a significantly different methods of perception and cognition?
It means that mathematical truths are truths throughout the universe. Just about anything else you might want to talk about has ex- or implicit assumptions that the other party might not share. (For example, how to indicate “good”? You might think that up means better in general, but that might not be true for aliens.)
On the other hand, we believe that no matter where you are in the universe, 1=1, 2+2=4 and so on and so forth. So the aliens would have that in common with us. If we were able to present mathematical truths that could be decoded by their structure, that would enable the other party to understand “1”, “2” “+” “=” etc. Hopefully from there we can build up to more sophisticated concepts.
Note that you could just as well say that physics is a universal language, or even chemistry.
Ditto. I was going to write this even before I saw the post. But only the book, not the movie. The movie is nice entertainment, but the book goes into great detail explaining how an alien civilization sent us a whole bunch of information, and how the earth people went about decoding it. Really great. Many of the ideas mentioned on this thread are explained there in great detail, and in an easy-to-follow manner.
I seem to remember reading something pretty interesting, on the premise that some aliens want to beam us over to their galaxy for a chinwag but need us to describe everything about ourselves and our world first, so that they can construct a suitable environment for us to live in. The question was, just how much of our reality is it possible to describe?
I’m pretty sure we use maths as a common language, but English might be assumed. Anyway it turns out the only thing you can’t really ever describe objectively is the concept of “left” and “right”. You always have to have a common background for that one - which unfortunately means you can’t explain which direction quarks or something should rotate in, so you can’t ever be sure they won’t build the whole structure out of antimatter.
This is remembered very vaguely. And I am no scientist.