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
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.
Latest Answers