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In Douglas Adams’ famous Hitchhiker’s Guide
to the Galaxy series, we are introduced to the Babel Fish, a little fish you could put
in your ear that instantly let you understand any language you heard. Sadly, the
poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication
between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than
anything else in the history of creation.
So today we will be looking at alien languages,
what strange forms they might take, and how we might go about decoding and translating them.
Those are hard enough when we consider them in the context of classical Sci-Fi and SETI,
where we assume humanoid aliens are speaking to us intentionally, sending us radio signals
we are technically capable of receiving and intellectually capable of understanding, but
things are likely to be much harder in reality.
SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence, comes in a lot of forms, but the most well-known is listening for radio signals
that look like clear signs of communication, or at least signs of transmissions by intelligent
life. It’s biggest weakness, and one of the reasons we don’t spend much time discussing it on
the show, is that it assumes alien communications would be readable or at least recognizable to
someone other than their intended recipient.
The obstacle might not be that the aliens are
encrypting their transmission, because it would make reading their signals difficult enough if
they were just compressed. Transmitting data is expensive, so it’s in a sender’s interest to limit
how much raw data needs to be sent to achieve a successful transfer of information. Let’s use this
video as an example, at about 30 minutes long, with 60 frames per second and over a
hundred thousand individual images. In its uncompressed form, with about 2 million
individual pixels per image, we’d need over 200 billion pixels to be recorded and sent, along with
information about the appropriate wavelength of light, and its intensity or brightness. In an
uncompressed and simple form, this might well be over a trillion bytes. But rather than raw
data, I generally upload my videos at 1080p HD, and about 3 gigabytes each. So that’s a lot of
compression. And like any compression, it works fundamentally by taking any pattern and replacing
it instead with a note that the pattern exists.
So the better you are at data compression,
the more parts are left out, and the more your signal looks like noise, making it hard for
folks who don’t know the method of compression to recognize they’re seeing a signal at all. But this
doesn’t mean a compressed signal looks completely like noise: the goal with compression is not
encryption, it’s minimizing data and improving transmission speeds, so we shouldn’t assume
that the more advanced a civilization is, the more their signals look like gibberish. No,
the objective is to transmit the information with minimum loss or distortion, while minimizing
effort needed to pack and unpack the signal.
Note that I say effort, because while
the objective with a digital signal is to minimize the bits being transmitted, the goal
of language in general is the transmission of concepts in a way that least distorts their
meaning. Essentially all language is intended to be a form of data compression. This is
the critical point about alien languages, that language is a way of relaying compressed
concepts, and that compression is part of what might make them so hard to translate while at the
same time the universal nature of many of those concepts is what ensures we can translate
them, that it isn’t an impossible task. Of course if words are compressed concepts,
we can’t know the means of compression, if they have vocal cords and ears for instance,
and some of those concepts might be alien.
On the other hand, numbers like two, three, and
four should be universal concepts regardless of culture or biology and, the notion of adding or
multiplying numbers should be universal. Area, volume, density, and essentially all of math and
geometry, should be commonly shared, which is why we often think of math as a potential universal
language. Logic too should be universal.
But it goes beyond that, since physical objects
should also be fairly universal. I’m not sure if we can take for granted that an alien mind
has a notion for objects and categorization, but it’s difficult to imagine how an advanced
intelligence could operate without such concepts. It would be a very alien mind indeed that doesn’t
look at an elephant and think, “This is a specific thing, it is very similar to that other thing to
its left – another elephant -- and different than that tall skinny leafy thing nearby, a tree, they
are all standing on a mostly flat surface, I shall call that the ground, many small objects make that
up, rocks and dirt, and far above is a big burning object that moves, I shall call that a sun.”
Such a mind would be particularly foreign to us as a species, one that does not classify
and categorize or even recognize objects, since we think that way for a reason, and part
of that reason is our method of data compression, not just linguistically but in our own thinking.
Our brain has to move data around and act on it, so it presumably also has to take patterns and
simplify them into a compressed form that works on recognizing those patterns. We can actually see
this at work in our psyche, when we see shapes in clouds or faces in an image: it’s essentially our
pattern-recognition playing tricks on us. While it works most of the time, we can still see cases
where the suggestions of a pattern or concept tell us something that isn’t quite right.
On a more complicated level, mental fallacies are also examples of this, where we perceive a
pattern or continuation of a pattern that isn’t necessarily there. Somewhere in your head, and my
head, is the gooey brain-analogue equivalent of a file titled ‘elephant’, or ‘face’, with a list
of what these things are, and how to identify them. There might well be another broad category
titled “rock”, presumably listing a wide range of attributes that define a rock. But we have
to consider that it might not match mine or the next person’s completely. So if I say ‘Can
you hand me that rock?’ and point at a brick, some people might instantly grab it, while
others might be a bit confused and search near where I pointed for a different nearby
object, figuring I didn’t mean “brick”, and someone else might ask for clarification, or
offer it by saying that a brick is not a rock.
Somewhere in our head is a file that says
“sun”, and that one for sun presumably contains information that the one that appears every
day is actually the same one, not a new object. This is something we take for granted, but
it really is wired into our association: we don’t have discussions about multiple suns, or
measure days in sun-deaths, though if our brain or our cultures did not have this requirement,
we might well call our days “sun deaths” or ‘sun births’, and have myths about all the past suns
that have come before. And so we might consider that a given alien culture might not think this
was the case until they had the technology to investigate their own sun, thinking of it as
a new object each time. Object permanence, the notion that objects continue to exist and
act or be acted upon even when we do not see or otherwise sense them is a fairly advanced
step of cognition in animals and human infants and maybe is not something we could take for
granted on alien worlds or in alien minds.
Or maybe this would be something that would be a
Universal idea even pre-science, as thinking its a new Sun every day because it disappeared over
the horizon might be like a child thinking it was a new Mommy who appeared everytime they uncovered
their eyes playing peek-a-boo. Given the central and comforting role both the Sun and our parents
tend to play in our existence there might be a strong psychological tilt to drawing conclusions
that made such central pillars seem stable and eternal. I was going to say that evolution should
generally prevent a species becoming culturally and technologically sophisticated if it was
insane, and thus things which reduced anxiety like assuming the sun would rise tomorrow might
be convergent concepts for that reason alone, however I’m very reluctant to say insanity or
anxiety are barriers to civilization, I sometimes suspect they are instead prerequisites.
Anyway, we might safely assume some physical concepts like objects, categories, and the
fundamentals of physics and chemistry are likely to be universal as well. Whatever they call
stars, they should have a distinct word or words for them. They may also put a different boundary
on them. For example, a species that evolved on the Moon of a gas giant around a star might
place the divide on words like planet and moon, and have gas giants and stars in very different
conceptual places. We ourselves changed categories on planets like with reclassifying Pluto,
and we did used to thinking of planets as a subcategory of stars, planets simplify meaning
those stars that wandered around the night sky, folks didn’t know they were rocks and
the stars balls of hydrogen and helium.
There are other considerations as well.
For instance, they might not have eyes, or might simply be sensitive to light, much as
we are to temperature, with a vague feeling for variance and direction. And yet, if we gesture
at the Sun and they are able to see that gesture and recognize it as an attempt to indicate an
object – both big ifs, admittedly – then there should be a fairly limited number of concepts
they think I’m attempting to convey if I then utter a word and they can hear it. Taking all
those big “ifs” into account, they’re likely to get that I’m trying to say “That thing in
the sky I’m pointing out is called the Sun”.
They might think I’m saying “Bright object”,
and think I mean the general concept which would include a lightbulb, which might be called
mini-suns or portable-suns in their language. They might think I’m describing the trait of
bright, or the time of day, based on its east and west position, or even the season based on how
high it rises at noon based on time of year. They might think I mean the color, or am expressing a
warning about radiation, sunburn, or cancer. They might be deaf and think I’m pointing at objects
asking them to name them, which they will do by flashing infrared heat patterns on their forehead
or blinking their eyelids in a precise pattern. They might be blind and have very good hearing,
but have no idea what we’re pointing at. They might have directional hearing that let
them know what way I was projecting my voice, so that they could identify the object if I
named it while having my head titled that way.
And yet in spite of all of that, blind though
they are, literally or metaphorically, they can figure out what color is because they can think,
and they still conceptualize and categorize. They can know what a photon is in the same way
we know about a proton, neutron, or electron. We can’t see those either, though a species that
could somehow detect and manipulate them as we do light or sound might “see” those particles
in some analogous way to how we see colours, and make images of them. Indeed, we even name the
quark forces of color charge red, green, blue, anti-red, anti-green, and anti-blue, even though
they have nothing to do with color for us, because we can categorize and conceptualize,
and have used those names as an arbitrary system for classification. We just color coded
the mysterious force for discussion purposes, letters or directions would have worked too. An
alien somehow able to see these color charges, as we call them, but unable to see photons of
the visible light spectrum, might detect photons through scientific experimentation and name them
after whatever they called the quark force types, in a similarly unrelated and arbitrary way.
But translating to or from an alien language might present a significant challenge. On the one hand,
we might find all kinds of different lifeforms, and they may not communicate in the convenient,
Sci-fi, humanoid way: they may use clicks and buzzing, or colour patterns on their skin, or
scents, which may not even be detectable to us, making any form of translation completely
impossible without some form of purpose-built technology. If we’re lucky enough to encounter
aliens who communicate in a manner similar to us, there are all the questions that come
along with any earth-based language, but with all the additional issues of having
different references. Coming back to the example of the sun, if we attempted to talk about a
“day” with people from a tidally-locked world, we’d likely need to draw on different shared
concepts to convey that we mean “a period of roughly 24 hours which we denote by the motion
of our home star in the heavens”, something for which they may have no independent notion. For
us, this idea of “day” crosses cultures and is universally understood, but we’d almost certainly
need to discuss it in independent terms.
It’s hard to discuss having a ‘rough day’ with
a creature from a tidally locked world with no night and day, or one that has no sense of
texture for a concept like rough perhaps. A creature adapted to zero-gravity is not going
to have euphemisms for ‘getting floored’, ‘being up against the wall’, or a hundred other little
ways height and gravity work into our languages. Given that one of the more likely scenarios
for meeting aliens would be far ahead in time and deep out in space, it’s quite possible
they would no longer be adapted to gravity, or for that matter that we might not
be, see our Zero-Gravity Civilizations episode for more on those physical
and psychological adaptations.
So the reality is that even if a being
evolves teeth, tongue, vocal chords, and uses vocalizations to communicate, it may not make use
of words in the sense we think of them. Everything could go “right” in the direction of human-like
communication and an anthropomorphic form, and we could still end up ‘left’ with a language
based on grunts and squeals. On the other hand, they might use sign language, which we also have,
and our language is not just spoken words, it is a hodge-podge of facial expressions and gestures
and body language too. For that matter our modern languages are hodge-podges of old ones.
English is a great example of just how messy things can get, since it incorporates elements and
even entire words from Latin, French, old Norse, and several Germanic languages. It has linguistic
rules, but they’re riddled with exceptions, and loan-words with no other context in the
language are used to fill in contextual voids. In terms of a language having consistency, English
is pretty bad. But we still manage to understand what someone is saying, and even if we don’t know
the word we can generally guess their intent. We break thoughts up into discrete sections,
like sentences, and those have a syntax which we recognize. For instance, we can tell that “John
walks the dog” is different from “Dog walks John”, because of how the sentence is structured: even
if we don’t know what “walk” is, we know that it’s an action somehow relating “John” and “the
Dog”. Similarly the dog wags its tail, the tail does not wag the dog, and this is another example
of universality, as it's hard to imagine an alien species would not have an understanding of cause
and effect, but be smart enough to actually talk to rather than simply interact with. No
technological civilization should be able to exist without understanding cause and effect.
When we’re talking about alien language, this is probably our biggest boon. Anyone coming
into a language with even a basic understanding of its syntax and a few of the core concepts we
discussed earlier--like mathematics, geometry, or chemistry--can probably piece together some
simple statements, and use those statements to establish meaningful dialogue about other topics
down the road. In essence, we might be able to learn the compression of other languages through
certain fundamentals which are universally shared, even if certain localized ideas like ‘sunrise’
aren’t our initial point of reference.
On the other hand, translation of an alien
language when neither of you already knows the other’s will be a difficult feat, and probably
not something we could do without massive amounts of recorders and computers unless we got very
lucky about their biology paralleling ours, but it will be possible, because they are smart
too. Assuming they are anyway. Folks like to quasi-anthropomorphize animals by saying humans
just don’t speak their language but the reality is they haven’t got one, not like ours. My cat
might understand another cat better than me principally because it has a very limited set of
concepts and it happens to match the other cats, so through simplicity they are able to
interpret what the other is expressing. It is not a language, language is a human
concept that varies from place to place as an artificial construct of civilizations, but
many of them can communicate, even across species, and some can communicate more complex
notions. But the lion communicates to the antelope that it wishes to harm or eat
it, and this communication is not language.
Communication, intentional or otherwise, is
presumably the domain of any sentient entity, which is to say something able to perceive or
feel things, language is presumably the domain of sapient entities, see our episode “What
is Sentience?” for the distinctions between the two but for the moment we will say that
language requires much more abstraction.
Human language is a very artificial
thing learned by each individual human, and uniformity – such as it is – is achieved by a
combination of long exposure and usage, and shared biology. Which is to say you grew up around folks
who communicated using equipment you also had and who put an effort into encouraging you to
do it using the established protocols and terms. In other words babies usually learn the
language their parents use, not a different one. You went along with it from a mix of curiosity and
need, hence why your first words were generally either attention-getters of naming the caregiver,
Mom or Dad, or object identifiers of the thing you wanted, like Ball or Food. For an alien,
this same concept is probably applicable, their languages will be built on increasing
complexity of shared biology that is well suited for fast information passage.
That’s why it probably would not be smells. Humans can smell things, and our sense of
smell is much better than we usually assume too, and we certainly can communicate
with them in a very rough sense, but it is much slower and less precise than
hand gestures, facial expression, glances, and noises which form our main communication
method. Humans are not audio-only critters, we can pass information along a lot faster and
clearer in face to face communication, but we have as complete a tongue in spoken words as we can,
and an even more abstract words-only written form. Written language is hugely compressed but not
as compressed as the spoken word, which can carry volume and tone more clearly and quickly for
instance. Smell is slow, and same as you have to erase a blackboard when it's full and it leaves
a thick blurry layer, a smell based language is going to be a low-bandwidth one because of the
time smells take to move, dissipate, and so on. We principally use it in the higher animal world
for communications meant to have long dwell times, like territorial scent markings. If you
can’t see or hear, then it might have to do.
Now could you understand sight
or sound if you could only smell? Presumably yes. I doubt that we all have identical
concepts for visual objects and categories, where blue ends and green begins probably
varies from person to person for instance, but can a blind person know color
who has never seen it? Yes, they can, and it might be that they conceptualized it as
something akin to the texture the surface of objects has to touch or maybe an analogy to
sound, it would vary from person to person, and presumably from alien to alien more so.
However, brain-imaging finds that when a sighted person hears a color it triggers the sensory parts
of their brain as opposed to the abstract parts triggered when someone hears concepts
like ‘justice’ or ‘responsibility’. For a blind person hearing a color will trigger
those same areas of abstract thinking, red, green, justice, and responsibility are all abstract
not sensory for them. A deaf person cannot hear birdsong, one born deaf can understand it, even if
it's in the abstract sense. I cannot see justice, I cannot hear responsibility, I can discuss
both, and while trying to discuss a rainbow with a person born blind or a morning birdsong with a
deaf one may not be as easy it is with most folks, so too it isn’t easy to discuss them with a person
who can see but has never seen a rainbow or heard a birdsong, and pre-modern times we couldn’t just
pull up photo or audio recording of either.
Which is the other half of the translation issue,
sheer quantity of data, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First let’s talk about writing and data
storage. An alien might live in a dark environment of thin air where the best means of communication
available to them was to rapidly tap their feet so their exoskeleton generated a high tempo beat they
could control the tempo on with high precision. This might be their language, but because
sound does not linger for days let alone years, unlike smell, at some point they will want a
written language, even if the means for writing it is to etch into stone with controlled
use of their highly acidic urine or spit.
Why? Because writing is not a human concept,
writing represents the desire to communicate with someone who is not currently there, and
that should be a universal desire. There may be a few exceptions, like giant hive minds
or singular intelligences or ones with near perfect recall who really have little need
to communicate that way and don’t develop it, but they should be exceptions not the norm.
Now writing can be used for other purposes, like a backup memory, where you draw a little cow’s head
and mark sticks next to it for each cow that came by that day to keep track of your herd or tax the
herders bringing in their cows to trade in your town, or giant squid-monsters I suppose since
we’re talking aliens here. You can use this for your memory or as a quick unique language you made
with a partner. You probably wouldn’t think you invented a language by telling your fellow herder
that you tally sheep and cows and chickens by having empty pepsi, coke, and mountain dew bottles
respectively in which you drop pebbles, but in a way you did, and you created a communication
method with a specific protocol for data and a compression method. It’s obviously a very crude
and limited one but could be expanded upon.
We cannot assume an alien watching us gesture at
various chickens, cows, and sheep while dropping rocks equal to their numbers in bottles, “One
Chicken, two Chicken, one sheep, five sheep, six sheep” and so is going to get the point
instantly or right on the nose, but if you do it enough they should. Again, sheer amount of data.
We often talk about how we have languages from back in the day where writing was still not too
common where we don’t know what it all means, and we use this as an analogy for aliens’ languages
being indecipherable, but this is wrong.
We can’t translate those old tablets of this or
that ancient civilization because we just don’t have much data or uniformity. Some civilization
that never invented dictionaries that sprawled over hundreds of towns and hundreds of years
but only gave us maybe a thousand words, written by twenty different people
each from a different town or time, is not something you can translate with certainty
because you don’t know if someone’s shorthand abbreviation or typo with a slightly different way
of doing some of the letters is even the same word as in another example, so determining what either
or both of them mean is in many ways harder than brute forcing a language written by aliens.
Bigger and more technological civilizations will probably standardize meanings of the
symbols they are using to record information. More importantly though they will just have an
awful lot more of it. They will have a digital way of storing it, because computers are too handy,
and I daresay any species naturally talented at math and computation will invent them faster even
if they need them less, so they will have digital medium not just analogue. They will find it handy
to rapidly send data between places and that means something moving at light speed, and they will
probably find things like radio, magnetic tapes, optical discs, semiconductors, and so on are
good methods of storing and transmitting data.
That means somewhere on their discs
or whatever is a definition of a star, of hydrogen, and of fusion. I do not know how
many times the word ‘Thursday’ is used in books, or on the internet, or on radio, but I bet it gets
used more on radio on Thursdays then on Mondays, and I bet it has been used millions of time
if not far more, and I bet it gets used in conjunction with words like day, year, month,
24/7, 9 to 5, am, pm, and so on untold times. An alien hearing our radio is not us looking at
a handful of damaged tablets written by different generations using different local lingos and
having so little of it that most of their words aren’t used on the tablets even once. See our
Cryptic Aliens episode for a walkthrough of how even just listening to radio DJs and analyzing
the red-shift of the signals over a day and a year might let you crack a lot of our languages.
And a lot of physical concepts are going to just have words recorded in their digital
or analogue signals. There is a definition of water, even if might get easily confused with
seawater’s word or blood’s or liquid in general. A definition of carbon and lead and iron, all in
digital form which if we can recognize it and or they can in ours, can then be rapidly translated.
And there’s probably a definition of the word ‘justice’ even if for them its three different
notions seen as separate that roughly translate as rules of a game, method or dispute arbitration,
and record of execution, or similar. It should be possible for them to die, so they should have a
concept for death. It should be possible for one of them to kill another, so their should be a
concept for accidental killing and intentional, even if the latter requires such a break
with the norm of their psychology that murder is universally considered a type of insanity
rather than an act of malice for which one can be guilty. We can consider an alien species which
may have no concepts for greed or selfishness, in that same light, and thus might not get
theft, but it would seem likely that most if not all alien civilizations will arise around that
same dynamic of individual survival and desire in tension with group cooperation, so they are
likely to have concepts like murder and theft and thus presumably need words for them.
Animals have territory so they can survive, they mark it out as theirs. They do so even though
it is warning others you are there and claim it, thus making them on the alert for a possible
attack by you, and an unexpected ambush would be more likely to work successfully. However, since
neither entity wants to be injured or killed, and that’s a high probability in an encounter,
the territorial marking decreases the number of encounters even if by forewarning the rival you
increase your odds of losing any given encounter. This logic would seem fairly universal too, thus
we would expect aliens to communicate territory to one another in some fashion, and probably in
space too rather than hiding from other aliens, as we discussed in Hidden Aliens. This is probably
done by radio signal rather than the time-honored traditional method of peeing on things, which
is less effective in a vacuum light-years wide.
Maybe not, but we know every human civilization
will have words for hands and ears and feet and hair because we have these things and will name
them. These abstract concepts, territory, justice, love, possession, friendship, and so on may be a
lot more universal than hands and tentacles are.
Now we can come up with an almost infinite
array of ways in which languages might be built, yet we can assume things like radio
transmission or optical or magnetic storage because of how universal physical laws are and
how efficient such things are at the purpose. In this same way we should not assume any given
alien is going to concoct a complex language utilizing a method their biology
allows just for the novelty of it… though they may have limited versions of their
language exactly for that. Possibly for novelty of course but because it might have niche uses. We
have sign language even though we use spoken word as our principal communicator and gestures, facial
expressions and so on as supplementary methods, sign language is handy for communicating at close
range with line of sight when silence is desired for instance. This means they too are likely
to have niche alternative means of speaking, and thus understand that some other creature might
use a method they do not, but it is likely to be a method that makes sense for the environment or
the goal of fast and accurate concept relaying.
So a careful use of a colored flag lifted in a
specific pattern of directions and speeds, for instance, is generally not convenient, so we would
not expect it to be a main language conveyor, though its one humanity has often used. Smell
travels slow, carefully filling glasses with water to different heights and ringing them to create a
pattern of sounds and tones is a major pain in the butt, so we wouldn’t expect someone to do that,
but one could imagine a species whose biology was so arranged. A spider could weave a web that
said something, like with Charlotte’s Web, but that’s not going to be too convenient usually.
Again we can imagine a vast array but we can probably guess what an alien might use by just
knowing their biology, if the creature has no vocal cords or lips because its lungs for air and
mouth for food don’t share the same throat and orifice, but it has some big biological drum built
into it that it regularly whacks and seems to emit repeating timed patterns, then you can probably
bet that’s part of what it uses for talking.
Though someone watching our lungs might
falsely assume our rate of breathing was how we communicated, some pattern of breath or heart
rate. It’s entirely possible it has a complex series of shoulder shrugs or toe wiggles that
are part of the process, or how it puts its feet, and while we’re trying figure out what it means
with its hand gestures, which mean nothing, its ignoring us point our fingers at things and
trying to figure out what our toes or shoulders are saying, which is mostly nothing. We do
communicate with how we set our shoulders, but we only use them in a limited way as part of
our language, a shrug of the shoulders can state uncertainty on a matter, but we do not use them
as a letter or word-sound. Fast breathing can communicate distress, fear, desire, etc but is
not used for relaying words or letters either.
The other trick we might have for determining
how they talk is by looking at how they listen, because odds are any natural language has
a limited range of accuracy that makes the critters using it focus on whoever is speaking,
so to speak. We don’t have to look at someone to understand them but it helps us guess
what was said when it’s a bit unclear. Having had a speech impediment my whole
life, even after a lot of speech therapy in recent years, I still habitually tend to
look right at people when speaking to them, and more so if they’ve indicated in some
fashion they had problems understanding me, to make it easier for them to read my face, lips,
and so on. We can probably assume a lot of aliens would be turning their sensory organs toward
the communicator and start guessing by which are used and when, what the various main
and secondary means of communication are.
Ultimately after that it’s all about collecting
a lot of data and examples, and analyzing their frequency and pattern, and if you can interact
with them directly, not just by distant and slow radio, by assuming that if they are staying
near you and not trying to flee or kill you, that they are also observing and that they will
probably be trying to do what you’re doing, which is figuring out how to communicate and
assuming the other person is too. So it might need a long time to figure out that us lining
one on our limbs up in a various directions and exhaling in patterns was us pointing at an object
and giving the auditory vibrational pattern to identify it, and we might need a long time to
realize it was spitting on an object to indicate it was naming it while spitting halfway between
it and us to indicate it wished us to name it, all while do that naming by a rapid and precise
blinking of twenty eyelids. But with enough intelligence, recording equipment, computers, and
most of all, a desire to communicate and patience, it will get figured out.
Differences in languages can make our fellow humans seem very alien to us, and yet
in the end the fundamental purpose of languages, to share often abstract but universal ideas, is
what makes each of us less alien to each other and what might make aliens
seem much less alien to us.
So we ran fairly long today for an alien
civilization series episode, and I ended up cutting out a discussion of what the common
medium might be for transmission to say hello, like how we might send a signal with the
intent of it being noticed or vice-versa.
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great genius discuss his thoughts on Alien life. So this means you can watch all the
amazing content on Curiositystream, but also all the great content over
on Nebula from myself and many others. And you can get all that for less than $15 by
using the link in the episode’s description.
So that will wrap us up for today but we have our
mid-month Scifi Sundays episode on Laser Pistols, Lightsabers, and other scifi weapons coming
up this weekend. After that we’ll be discuss Arcologies, giant buildings containing whole
communities and ecologies and how to design them, before wrapping up our May episodes with Solar
Flares and their impact on the Fermi Paradox. Then Closing May out with our Monthly Livestream Q&A on
Sunday, May 30th, hopefully from our new studio.
If you want alerts when those and other episodes
come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you’d like to help support future
episodes, you can donate to us on Patreon, or our website, IsaacArthur.net, which are
linked in the episode description below, along with all of our various social media forums
where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the episodes and many other
futuristic ideas. You can also follow us itunes, Soundcloud, or Spotify to get our
audio-only versions of the show.
Until next time, thanks for
watching, and have a great week!
