How do aliens communicate

Scientific speculations about otherworldly life, intelligence and technology often rely on the Drake equation. This mathematical framework was first written down by astronomer Frank Drake in It estimates the number of communicating species by looking at the fraction of stars in the galaxy with planets, the percentage of those planets that develop life and the odds that such living creatures will grow curious about, and capable of, making interstellar contact with other beings.

Lares and his collaborators wanted something simpler. The resulting arrangement places a bunch of nodes—or intelligent message creators—at random throughout the Milky Way, where they sometimes broadcast and sometimes do not. The team ran more than , simulations, each time with a different set of assumptions about these basic parameters, to see which scenarios favored interstellar contact. A galaxy full of technological aliens announcing themselves produced far more interactions than one where species were separated by vast distances or great amounts of time.

Such conclusions might not necessarily be shocking. But Lares counters that quantifying our intuitive conceptions with mathematical models can be valuable, if only to serve as a reality check on our basic understanding.

The findings set a kind of upper limit on the probability of contact under different circumstances, he adds. But if the lights are flashing out of sync with one another or at vastly different times—a situation analogous to using the wrong contact technology or being separated by large time spans—intelligent species might never find one another.

Yet humanity has slowly been sending out fewer radio emissions over the decades as we have upgraded our technology to wired and fiber optic cables, which has lessened the chances that aliens might stumble across our leaking transmissions. The work suggests this absence is not very meaningful—perhaps E. At the heart of the research is also an attempt to step away from some of the human-centric biases that tend to plague speculations about alien others.

Kopparapu concurs with this assessment. What would you do as a linguist to try to understand them? This presumes that we have a face-to-face interaction, which is probably not how it will go down.

We are much more likely to have to deal with a more prosaic radio signal. Superficially, this sounds disappointing. Everybody wants the saucer on the White House lawn scenario, and the radio signals feel like a distant second best.

One, a language which is learnable — which, depending on how alien they are, we might not have. There are at least two hypotheses here: the folks who think that for a language to be a language, it will possess a core similar to our own, so we could learn it, and the folks who think that alien bodies and environment might be dramatically different from ours and this might cause their language to be correspondingly different, and so un-learnable.

As a linguist, in a new language-learning situation , I rely a lot on context. The thing a linguist can bring to this situation is perhaps first to have some beginning of an understanding about all the many, many ways this can go wrong and be alert to as many of these as possible. The other thing is that a linguist is trained to conduct a systematic exploration of the language, figure out how sentences are put together , logically explore vocabulary and syntax and search out ways in which the rules of conversation might lead us to misunderstand one another.

Is it possible that an alien civilization has tried contacting us but we simply didn't understand it? It's possible. If they sent a radio signal in the s — if they tried to communicate with us by radio before we had radio, they would've gotten nothing. What is that? So SETI is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The idea of METI is that if you're going to have a conversation, there are two people who can say hello.

Some people oppose the idea of actively seeking contact with aliens, fearing that if they do exist they might be hostile. Where do you stand on that? It's really important to take ethical reservations on this very seriously , because we're all kind of together, dealing with the possibilities.

So if you are respectful, you want to listen to other folks whose opinions differ and try to come to an agreement. Whether all of Earth can come to an agreement, I don't know.

I mean, I have trouble when there are six people in my house agreeing on what to put on a pizza. So are we going to all agree about what to say on behalf of all the planet? I'm thinking that that's not likely. There just can't be much flexibility or continuity in the earliest phases of an evolution. If alien minds were entirely different from ours, communication might be impossible. That would happen if the way we think were just an evolutionary accident.

But though each evolution is composed entirely of accidents, that only holds for fine details. On larger scales, each evolution tends to first try relatively simple ways at every stage. So, since we're first on earth to grow a large intelligence, we probably did it in some likely way. This also must have shaped the ways that we communicate. I'd rather talk in terms of how our thinking works, except that we don't understand this well enough yet.

For every difference, move, or change, our language-syntax makes us seek some cause. No matter that no actor's on the scene: we'll find one, real or fantastic.

That's why we say, "It soon will start to rain". What makes us postulate a cause, no matter if we're right or wrong? I claim this isn't merely surface form, but stems from deeper causes in the ways we think. In languages, they often correspond to Nouns. Our minds describe each scene, real or mental, in terms of separate object-things and relations between them.

In languages, they correspond to Verbs. We use a clever mental trick of representing causes in same way that we represent objects. Whatever we can express or describe, we can treat its expression or description as though it was a single component inside another description.

In languages, this corresponds to using embedded phrases and clauses. It lets us build new ideas from old ones; in short, it makes it possible to think. The same in our computers, too. This must be why our languages use structures that can be re-used: our thoughts themselves must use the same machinery repeatedly to reach unlimited variety.

But what if they don't think in terms of objects and actions at all? I don't think it's an accident, the way we think in terms of thing and cause. It forces us to always wonder who or what's responsible, whatever happens. CRITIC: Why can't those aliens perceive entire scenes as wholes instead of breaking them down into our clumsy things with properties? They might instead see what there really is, holistically, as steady flow of formless space in time, instead of arbitrary separate mind-made fragments of approximations to reality?

But worshipping holistic schemes can blind us to the power we gain from usual ways of separating things. Each animal must pay some price, in clumsiness and nourishment, for each computer carried in its brain.

Enthusiasts of holism just never seem to see the price of "seeing everything at once". There have been some speculations that brains might use something like holograms for memories, but there is little basis for such ideas. For one thing, for a given investment, holograms store no more information than other methods. Now it is true that they facilitate certain kinds of recognitions, for example, to decide whether a certain picture contains a copy of some certain other picture.

But the cost of this is to make it much more difficult to perform most other kinds of recognitions e. Indeed, holograms may be nearly the worst possible way to represent relations among the features of the things it represents, because it makes it so hard to access those features separately. Otherwise, a memory can't learn: two holograms won't match at all unless the two entire scenes are virtually identical.

Memory and learning are useful only if they represent relations that are partially predictable. They simply can't depend on all the arbitrary features of a situation. If a scene contains 50 features, then there are a quadrillion subsets of features. Without some grouping idea like the concept of object, which makes some subsets predictable, we'd never see the same thing twice, hence could never learn from experience. Then knowledge can't accumulate. How does knowledge help? That question may seem frivolous unless we recognize that no two problems ever are the same in all respects.

Furthermore, knowledge can have use only if we can discover suitable couplings between those predictable-features and the Actions we can take. Only then can we learn which actions can make undesirable features disappear. Every evolutionary mind-development must seize opportunities to discover sensory-action correlations that enhance the animal's survivability.

To say "Y happened because of x" is, in effect, to say that x is a feature with some distinction in regard to predicting which actions can lead to Y. To deal with something complicated, one must find a way to describe it in terms of sub-structures within which the effects of actions tend to be localized. A problem seems hard when it isn't obvious what to do!

The most general way we know to solve problems is to set up a system that has a sense of making "progress toward a goal". In the late 's, Allan Newell and Herbert A. I see no way to prove that all intelligent problem-solvers, however alien, must use this selfsame principle. Before we ask how aliens communicate, we ought to ask how humans can.