#earthcalling

Human explorers in science fiction often find themselves encountering new worlds or alien species. Television series such as Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica as well as films such as Star Wars and Alien have created a diverse cast of alien forms—big, small, with and without antennae, adapted to different climates—in an attempt to characterize the diversity of creatures in a galactic empire. In spite of this visual diversity, many of the explorers of early science fiction found that they could communicate quite easily with extraterrestrial beings in their own native language of English! While this is partly a storytelling device to keep audiences entertained, it is worth asking ourselves: if we do beam messages into space, will the aliens understand?

Any extraterrestrial civilization that is actively searching for radio signals is at least as old, and probably much older, than humanity. In all likelihood, any extraterrestrial beings that we could conceivably contact will be much more advanced than us. Perhaps the aliens are really so much smarter than us that they can learn any languages of Earth with ease. If they do receive our messages—or someday welcome one of our astronauts—maybe they could learn English without breaking a sweat (if in fact they do sweat). Or perhaps they wear a universal translator device that allows them to understand any and all languages in the galaxy. If the galaxy is teeming with an empire of sorts, then perhaps this sort of translation technology is necessary for typical interstellar travelers. Maybe, just maybe, extraterrestrial beings could be able learn to speak like us.

The tricky part would be making sense of all the irrationalities, emotions, and cultural references that form the basis of all Earth languages. Aliens could be excellent mathematicians and could even have an uncanny ability to learn syntax and grammar rules. But would they be able to understand human concepts such as love, hope, anger, beauty, jealousy, or happiness? How would they make sense of words that describe the things of our world—cats, cars, carnivals, and kaleidoscopes—that may be entirely foreign to them? Would extraterrestrial beings even use language? Perhaps they have no sense of hearing at all and communicate in entirely different ways! We can never know for sure, at least until we make first contact. But in the meantime, thinking about the universality of language is at least a first step toward thinking like an alien.

-Pierre Fabre