Experts working on ‘universal language’ to help humans speak to aliens

Linguists including Noam Chomsky say
earthlings and extraterrestrials may share similar kind of
grammar

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The issue was debated at the society’s annual International
Space Development Conference in Los Angeles last week, with
some experts more optimistic about the prospect of a shared
language than others.

A day-long “Language in the Cosmos” workshop looked at
possible ways to develop a system of communicating with
aliens, by examining how humans talk with one another and creating
a language that can be spoken – and understood – by
everyone, the Daily Mail reports.

Linguists Jeffrey Punske, from Southern Illinois University, and
Ian Roberts, from the University of Cambridge, argue that there is
a universal grammar of languages on Earth, and that this grammar
may extend to extraterrestrial languages, especially in their
syntax, or sentence structure.

Speaking to CNet, Punske said: “We can expect that
extraterrestrial languages have a vocabulary consisting of building
blocks of meaning that can be combined to create more complex
meanings.

“While the possibility of human contact with extraterrestrials
seems remote, and the possibility of communicating successfully
with them seems even more remote, the laws of physics, information
theory, logic and mathematics could provide some common ground to
start from.”

Linguist and author Noam Chomsky elaborated on this theory at
the conference, saying: “To put it whimsically, the Martian
language might not be so different from human language after
all.”

Douglas Vakoch, the founder and president of Messaging
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), said he had been using
mathematics to “work on a universal language to let us speak to
aliens” and had “started messaging extraterrestrial
intelligence” in late 2017.

However, communication expert Gonzalo Munevar, from the
Michigan-based Lawrence Technological University, said that aliens
would probably have different brains to humans – or no brains at
all – and therefore “might perceive and conceptualise their
universe in ways that remain forever mysterious to us”.

The Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space agrees that Munevar’s
scepticism “seems in order, considering that we humans are still
not close to fully understanding other intelligent species on our
own planet, such as dolphins – even though we’re closely related to
them, and no relationship whatsoever would be expected with an
alien species”.