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?
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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...
Well, it is true, it certainly seems like hypothetical aliens are getting more attention than actual living creatures lately. I'm also hoping for a shift in this regard. Quite possibly it will happen with some cool machine learning powered breakthroughs.
Unless I’m mistaken, no other creatures on this planet have a language?
This is actually what this community is about. And, so far as I can tell, it really depends on how you define language. Possibly the most decoded natural animal language so far is that of prairie dogs. They have managed to identify sounds that represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives. When you change the color of the shirt of an approaching person, a predictable unit of the prairie dog call changes. They have even found that they have unique sounds for abstract shapes like rectangle and circle, which is especially intriguing since these are the sorts of things that they wouldn't often come across in nature.
It is true, however, that prairie dogs are doing little more than just labeling. For the more advanced cognitive stuff we need to look at examples such as Koko the gorilla, while we were not able to decode much of a natural gorilla language, Koko did show that she was able to use English at the level of a small child. What she was capable of was way beyond simply labeling. For example, Koko used English sign language to blame a human assistant for breaking the sink in living quarters. She also was able to tell jokes and laugh about them, indicating that she understood what a sense of humor is.
We are probably still a long way from decoding the most advanced non-human communication systems on the planet. The ways that some dolphins combine uniquely identifiable syllables would put the most advanced human beatbocers to shame. While humans generally combine syllables one after the other, dolphins do this while simultaneously combining syllables on top of each other. They have demonstrated abilities as advanced as devising and coordinating a unique, non-rehearsed action between two dolphins after being asked to do so by a human. They both received the command from the human, went underwater, and then returned to perform an agreed upon action together, one which they had neither ever done before.
With advances in machine learning, we may just be very surprised by what we discover is being communicated between the other animals we share the planet with.
Whales definitely do. They even have regional accents. It probably isn't as complex as ours, but we can't even understand that.
Whales make sounds and can “say” some things, but that’s not a language any more than my dog barking at me to feed him is.
Language is more complex than simply making sounds to identify things.
Right, but I'd say there's two aspects to language:
- Standardization. Different creatures need to agree on which sounds/symbols/etc. refer to what.
- Complexity. The ability to express arbitrary thoughts.
And well, I'd say if 1) is given, that aids us. A cat purring means that cat is content. We don't need to figure that out anew every time.
But 2) does not aid us. We should have an easier time understanding and responding to simpler thoughts than arbitrarily complex thoughts.
And yet, we're going straight for arbitrary complexity, while we still have barriers with simple communication, like not even being able to purr back at cats.There is lots of evidence of animals doing more than making sounds to identify things. Alex, the African Grey parrot had some pretty advanced concepts, such as numbers and even 0. When not in the mood to work, Alex would just make up wrong answers to be left alone, and would show irritation towards other parrots that were not understanding concepts.
Dolphins have shown the ability to creaye, communicate about, and and coordinate tricks that neither of two dolphins had previously performed.
There was an elephant that knew where an animal hospital was despite having had never been, it had been around elephants that had been however, so the assumption is that the location and activities there had been communicated.
These are just a few examples, there are many more instances where animals have been observed doing more than just labeling things with sound. This is actually why this community exists.
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.