– If we ever recieved an alien signal/message, how would we even begin trying to translate and understand it?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

> 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.