Beginning with the famous novel by HG Wells, The War of the Worlds, for over 100 years mankind has considered the consequences and conflicts that can arise from the first contact with a potentially hostile alien species. Around the same time, we began looking for evidence to refute our apparent galactic loneliness. The hope of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life remains an inspiration to many exoplanet hunters, astrobiologists, and SETI researchers. But what happens when we find the answer to the question posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi "where is everyone?" Will we and creatures from another planet be able to understand each other?
Noam Chomsky's famous theory of universal grammar suggests that certain structures of language are universal and have a genetic and therefore unique human basis. Developing a method to decode an unknown language without using parallels with the languages of the Earth seems like an insurmountable obstacle. It is possible that an alien language may be silent or, conversely, not have a written component, so these traditionally reliable methods would be useless if we were presented with such an alien language.
However, scientists - physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers - have tried to solve this problem on the assumption that mathematics and physics are a kind of universal language of the universe. The SETI Institute, founded in 1984, whose main task is to search for extraterrestrial life, actively collaborates with scientists and searches for signals from distant stars. So, the famous Arecibo message, sent in the direction of the globular star cluster M13 in 1974, contains coded information about our civilization, consisting mainly of prime and semi-prime numbers. A radio signal with a duration of 169 seconds will reach its destination in 25 thousand years. And the same amount will be required to deliver the answer. However, we are still limited by the history of the origin of life on Earth, and therefore we believethat life in other galaxies is at least a little like ours. But what if we're wrong?
This is what Arecibo's message looks like.
Diversity of life
In addition to representatives of Homo Sapiens, several million species of living beings live on Earth. And all of them, having no language in our usual understanding, communicate with each other. In addition to gestural and vocal communication, we can observe communication through dance in honey bees, and communication through infrasound, which elephants successfully practice. The human ear is unable to recognize the signals sent by animals, while elephants are able to communicate while being at a distance of 10 km from each other. These examples clearly demonstrate our bias in categorizing both non-human communication and in developing a robust translation methodology for new, non-human languages.
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Is mathematics the language of the universe?
Any attempt to communicate with someone who uses a different language must bridge the gap between the languages of the two interlocutors. It is for this reason that many scientists turn to mathematics as an unbiased way of communicating. Thus, the mathematician Dr. Hans Freudenthal tried to develop a language for use in extraterrestrial communication with creatures that are not familiar with the culture, languages or people of the Earth. Based on mathematics, Lincos - an acronym for the Latin phrase lingua cosmica, which means space language - teaches the basics of numbers, arithmetic, set theory, and mathematical logic. But what if extraterrestrial civilizations have different ideas of mathematics? For example, the Piraha people in northwestern Brazil have no developed meaning of numbers other than the general concepts of small and large quantities. Thus, the assumption thatthat extraterrestrial civilization perceives numbers, mathematics, physics and logic in a similar way, can be a fast path to misunderstandings instead of productive conversation.
The amalgamation of linguistics and computer science known as computational linguistics provides another variety of translation procedures, but also has similar disadvantages to mathematics and physics. Be that as it may, humanity has been sending radio signals into space for less than 150 years, and this significantly limits the number of potential extraterrestrial civilizations that could receive our message. One way or another, all that remains for us today is to wait for an answer further. And at the same time try to answer the question of what an alien language can be and can it change us forever if we can master it?
Lyubov Sokovikova