I’m speaking very hypothetically here, but if we happened to recieve a voyager disc style message from another planet, which contained numbers and writing in their language, how does the process of translation begin?
It still blows my mind that at some point, two people from the same planet that spoke very different languages (chinese and engish for example), started the process of learning each others languages and worked out what each other were saying. So how would this work for a completely new, unknown language with completely new characters, digits and language features?
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probably similar to how we decipher old languages. look for patterns, syntax, order, etc. but you’re right, the ENTIRE system of communication may be different.
to be blunt, there are way too many “what if’s” for this to be an ELI5 discussion lol. for all we know, the aliens can beam our native language into our head using a laser pistol they power with space slug juice
the movie Arrival actually does a fantastic job of showing how it *might* play out with dramatic effect. minimal spoilers, but the aliens communicate in an incomprehensible language and every country deciphers it a little bit differently based on the methods they used to try to communicate
edit: they actually had phd’s in linguistics help with the language and translation parts of the movie
Some concepts should be universal like counting so we’d probably start by working out what they mean by their numbers.
Next I’d guess we would try and work out the words they use to describe objects we can both see or commonly identify such as stars, planets, etc.
Lastly, I guess we look to any clues we might get from the object if there was a physical object like the Voyager Golden Record.
It depends if the signal was a deliberate attempt at communication or just a random message which was intercepted. A deliberate signal would contain information in to how to decode the information within. A random message would be treated like an intercepted coded radio signal during a conflict and attacked by codebreakers.
We can phrase this in the inverse and think about what we would do if we were sending a message to an alien race, with the intent that they have the beset chance of understanding it.
There are a few things in the universe which are simply fundamental to the way things work, and any technological culture would need to have some way of describing those base concepts, regardless of anything else. An example of this are natural numbers, prime numbers, and basic algebra. These are things which must exist simply because of our universe, and everything in thought and reasoning stands on those types of foundations.
So if we’re structuring a message to an alien race, absent any other information, the very first thing we need to do is establish a representation of numbers. The clear preamble to any message would need to be marrying our numerical representation to specific concepts by example. Binary is not a difficult system to explain, but it does need to be explained (even if we skip subtleties like negative numbers). For example, simple stuff like do you start counting bits from the left (little endian) or from the right (big endian) is entirely arbitrary, and while it’s fair to assume that any alien race has some notion of binary arithmetic, they would need to be able to infer what variant of these arbitrary choices we picked.
And this is really what it boils down to. We would be trying to make sure that every arbitrary choice and assumption that we’ve built upon is clarified. We can assume that alien races are cognizent of this same set of arbitrary decision points, and so they’re probably *looking* for answers to what choices we made, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need to pedantically walk it through.
Once we get all the way to the end of that type of preamble, we should be able to safely represent slightly higher level things like numbers and maybe even specific symbols. Communicating higher and higher level concepts involves continuing this process of demonstrating by example, building on what we demonstrated before. Eventually you can share a notion of nouns, verbs, syntax, etc. All of this can be described and exemplified, it’s just very very slow and time-consuming.
You should look at what was actually included with the Voyager probes for an idea of what we were thinking on this subject 40 years ago. *Arrival* is a great movie to watch if you want a more modern, fictionalized take on this problem.
A space civilization has to be able to do advanced math and math laws are universal as far as we know. *Contact* went with this.
So it has to follow math and likely has to follow data science ideas.
We could identify that it’s not natural relatively easily.
Translate? Without a key of some kind (they would probably have to be aiming at us on purpose), likely can’t. There are Earth human language barriers that are effectively untranslateable. With nothing else, someone who speaks English who receives data of Mandarin Chinese will never translate it. Probably not even if they know some spoken Mandarin Chinese.
. 1
.. 2
… 3
…. 4
….. 5
…… 6
1 = 1
2 = 2
2 + 3 = 5
1 + 4 = 5
5 – 3 = 2
6 – 3 = 3
2 x 3 = 6
1 x 4 = 4
6 / 2 = 3
4 / 2 = 2
I just taught you eleven symbols in my own mathematical language: the first six Arabic numerals, the equals sign, and the four basic arithmetical operations. All you have to do is count the dots and make the simple assumption that I’m *trying to teach you* my language.
If we intercepted a transmission that was not *meant* for us or any other new species, then it would indeed be difficult. If it’s just a loose radio signal that wasn’t intended for outside comprehension, or a communication between two points that we just happened to hear, then the message would be intended to be understood only by people who already understood the language. This was highlighted in *Contact* when the first message received by aliens was a television broadcast of Hitler opening the Berlin Olympics, and everyone freaked out…in reality, the aliens had no idea who Hitler was, they just bounced back whatever they got as a way of letting us know we were there.
When we intentionally send messages that are supposed to be meant for aliens, we include whatever instructions we can to help them along. Attempts like the [Pioneer plaque](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque), the [Voyager Golden Record](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record) and the [Arecibo message](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message) use basic, universal concepts to explain things about our lives that are unique to us, like the length of a second or a centimeter…aliens don’t have seconds, but they do know how long it takes a particular atom to vibrate, so if we show that atom, show it vibrating, and give a number of vibrations, they can figure out how long a second is, and from there a year.
You should read *His Master’s Voice* by Stanislaw Lem. It deals with exactly the problem you’re describing. Humanity received a signal from an alien intelligence but is unable to decipher most of it. The part that they could figure out leads to new physics that can be tooled to produce a weapon more devastating than nuclear bombs. The protagonist philosophizes that what we got out of the message shows more about our own inner nature than anything about the aliens who sent it.
If we ever intercept an alien message, whether we’re even able to understand will depend on our assumptions about how language works. The hope is that the senders will think enough like us to send something universal like mathematics and build from that, but we don’t really know if an alien intelligence would decide that that’s a priority. A message might be sent by beings that don’t even grok the concept of numbers. Or, in Lem’s example, they could be so beyond us that our best minds struggle to grasp the simplest ideas.
In the end, we won’t know how things might go unless it happens. And there are a lot of people who really hope they will see it and flex their linguistic muscles beyond their limits.
> I’m speaking very hypothetically here, but if we happened to recieve a voyager disc style message from another planet, which contained numbers and writing in their language, how does the process of translation begin?
Nobody really knows. (By the way, my understanding is that many of the people involved in the Voyager disks were extremely confident that no alien would ever see them, but regarded them as a useful PR effort to drive interest in space and/or an interesting academic exercise.)
> It still blows my mind that at some point, two people from the same planet that spoke very different languages (chinese and engish for example), started the process of learning each others languages and worked out what each other were saying.
The development of human languages is, presumably, strongly confined by the structure of our brains, in addition to environmental conditions common to all humans. For an example of the latter, all languages have a way of expressing “head” (the body part) because all humans are familiar with heads. An alien might not have a concept that really corresponds to our concept of “head”. They might even think in completely different ways from us. Their system of communication might not even be recognisable to us as language. How can we possibly guess?
In fact, we have a pretty limited understanding of how individuals of other social species on earth communicate with each other, even though we can be sure that many (and perhaps all) of them have a much simpler system of communication than we do.
I reckon an advanced species would know exactly how to communicate with us and is already doing so.
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