Humanity still does not know what language to speak with aliens. And this is a problem: what if they arrive tomorrow? And we, as always, are not ready.
"People have not yet seen a single alien from other planets, but they already have experts in contact with them," - aptly said the writer Terry Pratchett. In some ways, he is right: the number of charlatans posing as third-level contact specialists has long gone beyond reason.
However, there are exceptions. We are talking about linguists who, if the long-awaited contact happens, will be at the forefront of it. It is they who will have to find a common language with brothers in mind, about whom we know a little less than nothing.
We are not alone. But it is not exactly
We have no practical evidence of the existence in the universe of other intelligent life forms, except for ours. Theoretical calculations are of little help.
The Drake equation, which created the SETI program for searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, answers this question very vaguely. Depending on the interpretation of the variables, the possible number of contact civilizations in our galaxy ranges from two to several million. Agree, this does not narrow the search too much.
Promotional video:
The main thing is that there is a possibility of contact. So, you have to be ready for it.
To meet brothers in mind fully armed (in the good sense of the word), we need a universal information exchange tool that ensures mutual understanding.
Scientists have been closely dealing with this problem for several decades. Even a special scientific discipline has been created that is responsible for this area of knowledge - xenolinguistics. However, it has not yet been possible to overcome the barriers to creating a language that is intuitive for any intelligent life form.
Why? Let's try to figure it out.
Signs for dating
The same phenomena in different sign systems have mismatched, sometimes diametrically opposite meanings. For clarity, consider a scene typical of low-profile fantasy novels.
An earthly spacecraft is landing on a distant planet. A crowd of curious humanoids gathers around. The hatch opens, the astronaut comes out. Aliens are cautiously silent.
The astronaut raises his hands up, showing empty palms, and, smiling broadly, says: "Hello, friends." A sigh of relief sweeps through the crowd of aliens: well, thank God, our own.
To prove the absurdity of this situation, let's transfer it from the fantastic to the semantic plane. And we will analyze for the correspondence of signs and meanings.
From the point of view of our sign system, everything is flawless:
- Smile = kindness.
- Hands up = peaceful intentions, no weapons.
- "Hello friends" = offer a friendly dialogue.
However, what happens if you translate this semantic sequence into another sign system? In order not to go far for an example, let's take the sign system of the closest relative of man - the monkey:
- Smile = grin = aggression.
- Raised hands in conjunction with an upright stance = demonstration of superiority, striving to dominate.
- "Hello friends" = meaningless set of sounds.
If with the help of familiar signs we were not able to convince even a monkey of our good intentions, can we count on mutual understanding with extraterrestrial intelligence?
Will we be able to understand each other?
Some people think they can handle it. A group of optimistic linguists, led by the master of modern language science Noam Chomsky, argues that establishing dialogue with aliens is not a problem. Any civilization endowed with intelligence has a language. Any language is a system. Any system can be analyzed. We will meet, analyze, talk. Business then!
Opponents, of whom there are many, reasonably argue: why such confidence? We barely cope with our sign systems: we fought over the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for several decades, the Maya language was deciphered for a century and a half. Who knows what kind of language riddles the extraterrestrial intelligence will throw at us?
Pessimistic linguists cite two factors as the most likely obstacles to establishing contact. The first is the discrepancy between the conceptual apparatus. We arrogantly believe that the laws of our physics and mathematics are unshakable and universal for the entire universe. Building a model of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations, we start from this. However, where is the guarantee that this is really so? What if in their coordinate system twice two is not four, but 7.925? Or they don't have any mathematics or physics at all - it's easy!
The second possible obstacle is a mismatch in the means of communication. We establish contact with our own kind with the help of the senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, in especially intimate moments - taste. They probably use other tools for this that we simply cannot identify. For example, cunning radiation, inaccessible for perception neither our senses, nor devices.
According to the American linguist Sheri Wells-Jensen, if potential brothers in mind turn out to be humanoids, we will most likely come to an agreement.
Come up with a universal language
Attempts to create a language-quintessence, understandable for any form of mind, have been made repeatedly. The most famous of them is the Lincos language, developed in the middle of the last century by the German mathematician Hans Freudenthal. This language is non-verbal: ideas and concepts are described using numbers and mathematical sequences. He has many opponents who believe that the idea of the cosmic universality of mathematics is out of hand. However, in the absence of worthy alternatives, it was Lincos that was used to encode radio signals sent to potential brothers in mind at the end of the last - beginning of this century.
The international program responsible for sending such signals is called METI, Message to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, in translation - messages to extraterrestrial civilizations. Her leader Doug Vakoch honestly admits that all previous attempts to create a language for communicating with aliens have been unsuccessful. Tests on volunteers have shown that sign systems developed on the basis of formal mathematical generalizations are incomprehensible even to earthlings.
Therefore, in May 2018, METI activists gathered the luminaries of world linguistics at a round table and set the task: let's do something already. The linguists agreed: come on, just now? At the current level of development of science and technology, creating an artificial language is not a problem.
It should be based on a universal idea, understandable to any thinking creature in the universe. But it just does not exist.
Not? Will seek. The most reasonable way out of the impasse was suggested by the same Sheri Wells-Jensen, who suggested launching an Internet platform where any netizen can offer his own version of such an idea.
So if you are in the subject - do not yawn. There is a chance to go down in history.