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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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.
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