Debate between linguists and astrophysicists: if we made direct contact with aliens, could we communicate?

In Steven Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Type, aliens communicate with humans through a catchy five-note sequence. In the 1982 Spielberg blockbuster ET, a tiny alien learns basic English from a children's television show. More recently, at Arrival 2016, visitors in the shape of squid use pictograms to make themselves understood by American scientists who handle chalkboards with words.

But what would really happen if we made direct contact with an alien species? How would we recognize or interpret their intelligence and what would we say? These were just some of the questions discussed during a wide-ranging conversation sponsored by Harvard's Interfaculty Brain Behavior Initiative and moderated by Edward J. Hall, Professor of Philosophy Norman E. Vuilleumier.

Using the American sci-fi drama film Arrival as a springboard, panelists Jesse Snedeker, professor of psychology and expert in language understanding, and Avi Loeb, astrophysicist and author of Extraterrestrial: The First Signs of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021), examined the potential challenges we might face.

Loeb, science professor Frank B. Baird Jr. , has long argued that the search for extraterrestrial life should be taken more seriously in scientific circles. He said there are a variety of factors to consider if we encounter an alien race. (Loeb's book suggests that a fast-moving pancake-shaped space rock that astronomers called Oumuamua in 2017 could actually be a piece of interstellar technology.)

First, humans must try to conquer their sense that they are at “the pinnacle of creation” and instead understand that they are probably “somewhere in the middle of the distribution of intelligences in the Milky Way galaxy,” remarked Loeb, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative. Earth's inhabitants must also be aware of the “technology gap” that is likely to exist between the human race and a messenger from beyond the solar system. (This messenger, he said, would probably arrive in the form of an artificial intelligence object capable of making a journey that would last millions or even billions of years.)

Given a potential broad knowledge gap, we must also be prepared for the possibility that aliens may not want to communicate with all of us, according to Loeb, just as we don't want to communicate “with ants on the sidewalk.”

Even so, if we are able to participate directly as the Arrival scientists do, the challenge is how. “Such a process would differ greatly from the search for extraterrestrial life in years past,” Loeb continued, “when people imagined that any contact would probably come in the form of radio signals from aliens, which may have taken thousands of years to arrive. However, if you have a visitor in your backyard, you'd better know what they're doing as we might need our own AI systems to help us interpret theirs.”

According to Snedeker, one of the potential challenges of communicating with extraterrestrials is the possibility that these beings do not possess a conceptual system similar to ours. To illustrate this, he used the example of how children learn language. “When children hear a phrase like 'The cat is on the carpet', they have concepts similar to those of cats, to those of carpets and to those of spatial relationships. In Arrival, actress Amy Adams, who plays a linguist, tries to recreate the child language learning situation with aliens by offering them basic words to describe people and actions, all assuming that the conceptualization of aliens is reasonably similar to ours,” Snedeker remarked.

“But if those concepts were not within the reach of that other species, it is not clear what those words would refer to,” he added. Even so, Snedeker is optimistic that we may share some large-scale constructions with intelligent aliens that could also be the product of biological evolution. “I am hopeful that we have quite a few points in common with their conceptual structures,” he said, adding that “an incomplete understanding is still an understanding to some degree. If we had concepts that were slightly different from theirs, or even substantially different, we could still come to understand them.”

Loeb, who is working on a documentary with the Arrival producer, says that staying out of the search for intelligent life beyond our solar system is myopia. “We know that stars formed before the sun for billions of years. We know they have planets like Earth around them, so the environment we have is not uncommon,” he said. But finding evidence of extraterrestrial life requires the kind of funding and support given to large-scale projects, such as the search for cosmic gravitational waves or dark matter. “Given the public's interest in the subject, the implications it will have for the future of humanity, I think it's really unwise for the scientific community not to commit to a search,” he concluded.

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