Leading astronomers and linguists plan to develop a kind of universal language of mankind, maximally adapted for understanding by possible representatives of extraterrestrial intelligence. They spoke about the first steps towards its creation at the METI conference in Los Angeles.
“Noah Chomsky often said that if a Martian came to Earth, he would think that we speak different dialects of the same language. The reason for this is simple - all earthly languages have a common structure and a single history. The question arises - if the aliens speak, will their language be similar to our dialects? - stated Dough Vakoch, President of the Active SETI program.
For more than half a century, astronomers at the SETI Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations in the United States and their colleagues around the world have been trying to find life beyond Earth by listening to radio signals from various corners of the galaxy. So far, no intelligent or unreasonable life has been discovered, but this task, according to representatives of NASA and SETI, can be solved very soon - in the next 10-20 years.
For all 56 years of work, SETI astronomers have not been able to find unambiguous traces of extraterrestrial civilizations with one small and controversial exception. The so-called Wow! Signal captured by the Big Ear radio telescope in 1977 claims this role. In subsequent years, astronomers were unable to re-find the source of this signal in the constellation Sagittarius, which led scientists to consider it a reflection of radio waves from Earth from pieces of space debris.
Constant failures in this direction prompted Vakoch, one of the SETI participants, to try to solve this problem by contradiction and organize the METI project, or Active SETI. Within its framework, scientists plan to prepare and send into space special messages about where the Earth is, what people are and how to get to us, guided by the stars and other objects of the Galaxy.
The lack of success in both SETI and METI made Vakoch and his associates think about two things - do we ourselves understand what we are looking for, and do the aliens understand our signals? The sounds of human speech and our radio signals can look like complete nonsense to them, to which they simply will not pay attention, considering them to be the noise of space.
Last weekend in Los Angeles, Vakoch met with other METI members and the world's leading linguists, at which scientists discussed the possibility of joint cooperation between astronomers, linguists and mathematicians in creating a universal language of communication that would be understandable to potential aliens and in deciphering their messages.
Attempts to create such languages, as noted by Vakoch and his colleagues, have been carried out before, but all such constructions have one common drawback - they are not understandable enough even for other people. As a rule, abstract concepts such as pi or properties of geometric shapes did not cause problems in deciphering the language, but more complex ideas and their application to reality remained inaccessible to volunteers.
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This problem, according to Chomsky and many other linguists who participated in this meeting, is completely surmountable - as the famous scientist joked, "the Martian language as a whole should not be very different from the common language of people." The problem is that linguists have not yet found a general enough idea to create it.
It can be found in two ways - by analyzing the laws of physics that are common to both us and aliens, and by concentrating the efforts and opinions of a much larger number of people than a few dozen scientists.
According to Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguist at Bowling Green University in Ohio (USA), METI should soon launch a large-scale networking project in which Internet users will help scientists choose the optimal formula for creating such a language.