Are we alone in the Universe? - Dr Arik Kershenbaum, University of Cambridge

my name is Eric kershenbaum and I'm a zoologist here at the University of Cambridge and at guertin college and my research is into animal communication so I look at what animals are saying to each other and I also have a sideline of looking at questions about life in the universe and what it might be like how similar or how different from life on Earth so today I'm going to talk about how we perceive isolation in the universe and how that relates to our isolation from other forms of life on Earth and what that says about the meaning of our language and the meaning of animal communication good evening and welcome everybody you're joining us for our sixth lecture in the 2023 Darwin College lecture series and as some of you will know we have already explored isolation Through The Eyes of Scholars in Persian literature in geology and political science and physics but today it's the turn of a zoologist Dr Eric kirschenbahn who I hope will answer the question posed in the title of this lecture are we alone in the universe I'm sure it's something we all want to know Eric studies animal vocal communication and the evolution of language he's a fellow and director of studies at gurton college and a member of the Department of zoology here at the University of Cambridge and as I'm sure many of you know and have probably read he has authored a number of popular science books our ability to search for life beyond our planet is of course limited by the scale of the universe we're essentially staring into a void in the hope that someone or something will be staring back but as humans we've got an intense yearning and curiosity to discover alien life we need however to think about what life means and whether we should be fussy about the type of life we would like to encounter a casual encounter with an alien insect wouldn't be as exciting or interesting perhaps as an encounter with an alien with whom we could actually share our feelings and communicate in a meaningful way Eric has a story to tell which is both academically rigorous and yet stimulates us to imagine life out there in a manner that even explorers of space nor pundits of Science Fiction have perhaps ever considered and he believes on the basis of his research that it is expressed in his sometimes provocative but always fascinating books as you will learn that we may not in fact be doomed to isolation in this universe so on that note please join me in welcoming Eric to give his lecture tonight foreign thank you thank you master thank you everyone who's coming and I presume is interested in this surprisingly complex question are we alone it's a question that scientists try to answer so scientists who are working on the search for extraterrestrial life out there investigating and measuring but it's also a question that everyone asks everyone who's ever taken an interest in science fiction at least it hits the ball that we are completely alone we may be isolated on this insignificant Rock of ours floating through space and there's nothing else out there or it's possible that we are part of a universe of uncounted billions of inhabited worlds we don't know yet if we are alone if we are isolated what does that say about us we're unique perhaps that is a fantastic a fantastic state to be in or perhaps it's it's just depressingly lonely that we will never have another civilization with which to to converse and which to communicate people have been asking this question for I would say all of human all of human existence but of course our ancestors when they considered the possibility of life outside of Earth they had a very simple answer of course of course there's life there are angels there are spirits inhabiting the the celestial spheres that view isn't particularly um popular these days our rationalist revolution has swept all that away and we want to look for data we want to see evidence we want to see can we detect anyone and we haven't and since scientists have been looking for signs of life in the universe we haven't found any so the position that most people have taken for most of the last couple hundred years is yes we are alone there is no one else but things are changing and things are changing very rapidly so many of you will remember that it wasn't that long ago we didn't even know whether there were any other planets outside of our solar system only really 25 or so years ago that we realized that there are planets and they are detectable and since we first discovered the first exoplanets as they're called our instruments have studied thousands of stars and found many thousands of planets and as our instruments get better and better we're increasingly beginning to realize that there are probably planets around almost all the stars in the galaxy and a recent study estimated can only be an estimate that there may be as many as 40 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy not planets earth-like planets like Earth in our galaxy 40 billion we may be unique as humans we may be the only human-like life in in the universe but our planet is certainly not unique in any way and we're progressing very very fast so new instruments coming online like the the James Webb Space Telescope are bringing new capabilities we are now able to peer into the atmospheres of these planets at incredible distances and these instruments can look into the atmospheres of these planets and detect different chemicals the presence of different chemicals clearly there are some chemicals that would be of particular interest so if we were to find water that would be interesting because all life that we know of needs water but water's actually quite common in the universe what would be really amazing would be to discover oxygen and technically that's certainly possible now oxygen of course isn't essential for life we know there's plenty of life that doesn't that doesn't use oxygen first life on Earth didn't breathe oxygen at all but the thing about oxygen is it's such a reactive chemical you just wouldn't expect it to be hanging around in a planet's atmosphere for any length of time it would react with the rocks and so on and disappear so what instruments like James Webb Space Telescope are going to be looking for are chemicals that shouldn't be there unexpected chemical signatures because unexpected chemicals imply some unexpected mechanisms and life is an unexpected mechanism it's not the only one but it's certainly one of them life is fundamentally out of equilibrium with the rest of the universe it's the opinion of many not all but many scientists in this field that we are likely to find evidence convincing evidence possibly not conclusive evidence but convincing evidence of the existence of life outside of Earth within the next few decades possibly even sooner what would that do what would that mean what would that mean for us if we did discover tomorrow that there is life on another planet would we suddenly feel we're no longer isolated we're part of a galactic community would it change how we think about ourselves I would say probably not and one of the reasons is that the kind of life that we're looking for and the kind of life that we're likely to find is going to be very simple very simple life it's unlikely to be the sort of life that will challenge our position as the preeminent creatures of creation albeit the self-declared preeminent creatures of creation and if you look at the history of life on Earth you'll see that although life's been around for about 3 800 million years but the first 3000 million years life was extremely extremely simple and in fact if you were to choose a random point in Earth's history say I'm going to observe the Earth at a random point in history the chances are that all you would see is something like Pond scum now we don't know of course whether the Earth is typical of the way that life may or may not evolve on other planets Earth may be very unusual perhaps life evolved very slowly on Earth perhaps life involved very quickly on Earth we don't know we've never discovered any other planets with life we know Earth is is a relatively young Planet compared to many other planets that are out there so that life has arisen very quickly life arose on Earth very very soon after the earth was formed it's a good sign but our instruments that we can foresee being able to scan other planets and detect signatures of life on other planets unlikely to be discriminating enough to tell the difference between a bacterial slime and herds of wildebeest um it's extremely unlikely that we will visit other planets plans are in place to send probes to the very very very closest planets to Earth but that will only ever be a small handful of sights we really are unlikely to get any detailed information about what life is like on an alien planet unless well one hope is that somewhere in the Galaxy there is an alien David Attenborough who's going to be streaming nature videos at Earth but but barring that I I fear we're we're we're not going to know those details and so even if we do discover life on other planets we're likely to feel just as alone and just as isolated the alien bacteria is not particularly going to going to want to make friends with us now of course it's also possible that there are intelligent civilizations out there in the universe that will that will will come and make contact with us but from a scientific point of view it's difficult to say anything about them because we have no data I can make reasonable extrapolations from what we know about how many planets there are and the physical compositions of the planets and importantly how our scientific instruments are developing and and getting more sensitive and and a higher resolution I can make predictions about when we might be able to detect Pond scar I can make no predictions about when we might encounter an alien civilization they may come tomorrow they may never come we've got no way of knowing and being alone in the universe mirrors very interestingly the concept of being alone on our planet are we alone on Earth no patently not we're surrounded by animals and and plants and there's a whole teeming life on Earth and if you were to go for a walk in the woods you might feel alone in the sense I want to be alone you may feel isolated but you're not because even when you're walking in the woods when there's no other people around you are surrounded by life and you're interacting with that life the bird song is is making you feel happy the trees make you feel over awed there is a connection between us and the rest of life on Earth and there's some life on Earth that we have a very close connection with our pets for instance so why is it that we don't feel alone on earth when we're surrounded by life that we can't talk to but we would feel alone if the universe was full of life that we can't talk to question are we alone is a little bit more subtle than it seems at first what are we looking for what would make us not alone human-like life Star Trek life like humans with like slightly different makeup on their face is that what we need to be not alert why be why should we be excited about alien life and we're not excited about the life that surrounds us on Earth now I've worked in many very very isolated environments over the years and the jungles of Vietnam like like you see here I've worked in the Rocky Mountains in the Kalahari Desert and and oftentimes you are very very alone not another human being in sight and you're surrounded by life huge multitude of life but one of the things that you notice when you are out in the wilderness with no other humans around is there is a gap there's a huge barrier between us and everything else that we see around us we are insignificant we're not a part of that ecosystem it would go on without us just fine just fine they don't need us none of the insects of the plants the the Lions on the on the planes they don't need us we're isolated from the rest of nature on this planet of course because we can't talk to it foreign and rephrasing the question are we alone in that sense is there any one we can talk to gives us some very useful ways of of thinking about our isolation in the universe when we say are we alone in the universe what we really mean is is there anyone we can talk to in the universe and our isolation on Earth from animals and plants on Earth is because we can't talk to them although of course we do and there's actually quite a lot of of communication between humans and and non-humans on Earth at the very least with our pets we can have a very intimate relationship with our pets and we can have two-way communication do you want to go for a walk it is understood by every dog in the world you know and we understand instinctively their response and the wagging of the Tails and the excited look you know it's it's most definitely a two-way communication but despite that close connection there's something missing there's something missing we've both been evolving for 3800 million years on this planet and dogs and humans share 3700 of those 3 800 million years but we cannot share with them thoughts our desires our emotions our ideas with an intelligent alien were they'd come to Earth we share No biological connection whatsoever not a single minute of evolutionary history and yet we could discuss politics and literature and science with them we may feel more at home with a 12-legged alien than we do with a chimpanzee with whom we share a great great grand ancestor only six million years ago why can't we talk to animals we want to and our culture and our history is full of figures and legends about humans who talk to animals animals who talk to humans there's a huge there's a whole background to this idea but we don't seem to be able to do it it doesn't seem to work why is that well there are two possible um answers at least two one is that we're not smart enough or we haven't tried hard enough and certainly at the moment there are many people working on Research to try and see how we can how we can talk to animals and maybe we just haven't got there yet and we will do one day and the other possibility is the animals aren't smart enough and maybe they don't have a language then maybe that's why we can't speak to them how do we tell the difference how do we determine which of those two is actually the case so as scientists we want to get the right answer not the answer that we want and frankly we want to believe that animals can talk to us I want to believe that animals can talk to us I would love that but I'm not going to satisfy myself with assuming that they can because I want it we need to investigate it we need to research it and it's really difficult it's very very difficult how do you do it how do you go about finding out whether animals can talk well if I want to know whether a person can talk I'll just ask them can you talk it gets a little bit circular as you can see how do you determine this for for a species that doesn't seem to be able to talk well one of the things that we do is we observe animals and we observe their behavior and we observe their communication and we see if we can find correlations between a particular behavior and a particular communication and see if we can deduce something about what they are saying to each other like that that's extremely difficult in the wild animals are very difficult to approach very difficult to observe and it's sometimes very difficult to figure out what's going on here's some video that I that I took of Gibbons in in Vietnam and you'll see that their behavior and their communication is extremely complex complex communication really very that their vocal communication is very subtle I can't tell what's going on there I don't know if you can this is about as close as you'll ever get to to to to animals in the wild so so observation and correlation between Behavior and and communication is only of limited use now there are other things that you can do occasionally occasionally you can take animals into the lab and do experiments like that famous case of Alex the parrot who after years and years of training I mean really years of training it was possible for experimenters to ask him questions directly and have a sort of a conversation with a non-human it's very very unusual and very very very difficult dolphins are another species where it is possible to train them in captivity to have some understanding of the sorts of questions that that we're asking them and this is one of this is another um line of research that that I'm involved with like colleagues and I are working on ways to train dolphins to be able to answer questions that we ask them and maybe one day that will show us just how much the animals themselves do do say to each other and if that were to happen it would be a tremendous spectacular end to our isolation on Earth we would discover that it is possible to speak to other species if it happens when we look for life on other planets I robiologists people who specialize in in researching and investigating potential nature of life on other planets often ask the question what is life it's an important question it's an important question if you're searching for life because you have to design the instruments to measure things and you need to know what it is you want to try and measure but I tend to think we'll know life when we see it it's one of those things that that evades definition but it's kind of obvious like I said life is just out of equilibrium with the rest of the universe we move we grow we reproduce we interact with each other the rest of the universe doesn't do that we also have accumulated complexity through natural selection and in fact natural selection is the only way that life can accumulate sufficient complexity to be called life so really if we were to observe some on some other planet entities that underwent natural selection and remained out of equilibrium with the rest of their environment we'd certainly say this is incredibly interesting we might argue about whether it's life whether it's not life we can argue about whether robots alive for instance I don't know but we know it when we see it we know this is the kind of thing we're looking for when we see it a definition of life doesn't seem to be a really big obstacle for astrobiologists and that's not the case with language we think we can we're confident when we see life we have no idea how we're going to Define whether an animal is talking or not and this is important because as I said we're looking for talking life in the universe we want to find something that can talk to us but what does talking mean if we want to recognize alien life forms with whom we can hold a conversation surely we need to be able to recognize terrestrial life forms and determine whether or not we can hold a conversation with them and yet we haven't been able to do that we haven't found a good definition of language that everyone can agree on that distinguishes humans from those animals that don't talk one of the things that might help here would be if we could devise some kind of test some kind of mathematical or algorithmic device that we could say this is language this is not language and that will help us with our search for extraterrestrial intelligence because if we get a signal from outer space we want to be able to say okay I think that's language well no this is not this is not language but it's very hard to do it's very hard to design a test like that because the only example that we have is the one example of language human language and we want to make a test as general as possible so that it will apply throughout the Universe well are working on um such tests that can be applied to signals from outer space What would happen if we applied those tests to animals on Earth what would we find perhaps those birds that you hear on your walk through the woods really are talking about you or perhaps the dolphins really are saying so long and thanks for all the fish it would be a useful thing to be able to do but how do you do it we have to be very careful because although linguists have developed various uh technical definitions of what human language is we don't want a definition of language that automatically excludes anything that's not human-like then we've done ourselves no favor we want a definition of language that will be as universal as possible Universal enough to apply to alien language Universal enough to apply to potentially to animal language on Earth so we can't rely on things that linguists often rely on like words or nouns and verbs or a particular kind of grammar which is the kind of definitions of language that that we have at the moment but on the other hand we also have to be careful not to be too broad with our definition of language many people would say yes of course animals have a language they communicate and and it's all the same thing but we're really really doing ourselves a disservice if we do that to admit that what we do the way that we communicate is special it is different without prejudicing it by saying animals have it or haven't got it we need to recognize that it is it is something that we're looking for so we have to look at human language and try and extract those common characteristics without biasing ourselves to restrict it only to human language and this is one of the things that this is one of the things that I do so I'll give you a little example of how we might go about that let's imagine let's imagine a bird that can sing a song made up of five notes A B C D and E and let's say that a is the most common and B is the second most common and so on there's a number of different ways that the bird could organize its repertoire you could have a bird which sings lots of A's a is very very common and it occasionally sings B and no c d and e very very rarely appear so you'd get a distribution that looks something like that and the song would look something like that a with a B here and there now it's fairly clear that that song cannot contain very much information basically the bird is saying a so if you want to have a complex language that's not the way to do it on the other hand you can imagine the bird that sings a song where each of the notes is roughly equal in in probability and now the song looks much more complex much more complex and in fact from an information theoretic term that song has the maximal information capacity you can put as the the maximum amount of information that could be put into a into a song that looks something like that and so for a number of years animal communication researchers would say well let's measure the complexity of animal communication and let's see how complex it really is and perhaps if it's a language it will be more like this song It'll be very very complex so that it can contain a lot of information there's only one problem with that which is that humans don't do that that in fact human language looks more like this it's not maximally complex and more than that if you look at the distribution of words in human language you uncover a very peculiar phenomenon which is that the second most common word in English is half as common as the most common and the third most common word is the third is common and the ten thousandth most common word is one ten thousandth let's call it and this very very peculiar relationship surprised people because we don't have a maximally complex distribution of words however it has been suggested convincingly I think that the distribution of word frequencies in human language lies absolutely in the middle exactly halfway between the simplest form of communication that contains very little information and the most complex form of communication that contains maximal information right in the middle and it's been suggested that this is an evolutionary adaptation because language should be balanced balance between Simplicity and complexity a simple Communication System can't contain the information we need a complex communication system is just too expensive too costly cognitively for animals to to to evolve animals want the best balance between costs and benefits and when you look at human language you will find that every human language follows this rule every human language across the world so there's a very strong argument that information theoretical measures such as these are actually Universal Universal to language if a language has evolved through natural selection you would expect to see a pattern like that and it doesn't matter if it's on Earth on another planet so this characteristic of a repertoire probabilities has been proposed as a potential signature for language when looking at extraterrestrial communication there's only one problem loads of animals do the same thing loads of them we might argue that Orca who also show a very similar pattern of distribution might have a language I'm more than prepared to to accept that possibility but also much simpler animals songbirds hierarchs that I've worked with a lot and believe me hyraxas are pretty dumb they're pretty dumb animals they do not have a language and yet they still show the same pattern of of probabilities and it shouldn't surprise us of course because evolutionary Advantage isn't something that just humans have all animals want to optimize the balance between complexity and simplicity when you look at this you might think it's a some form of alien writing it's not this is a representation of a of a series of dolphin whistles where the lines indicate how the pitch of the whistle goes up and down and it's very complex and many people have suggested the idea at least that there may be some language in here how do we determine how do we work out whether this information constitutes a language and there are scientists who are using modern artificial intelligence tools to analyze these kinds of signals and see if they can find some kind of some kind of signature of a language within this communication I've no doubt that these research projects will show some very very very interesting results but will they be able to translate which is their goal will they be able to translate that dolphin communication into English well that depends whether there's a language there to translate in the first place and our desire to find language in animals our desire not to be alone on our planet with someone that we can talk to extends to to projecting our ideas of language onto animals the whole concept of translate involves words concrete meanings this sequence means this and the evidence doesn't really support the idea that that is what animals do you can't translate communication if it's not structured in in terms of concrete meanings and the reason I I say that I think that the evidence shows that animals don't have a language it's quite simple we don't see them using it we don't see dolphins using their communication as a language to do things together the kinds of Cooperative Ventures that we do together and why would it evolve why would it evolve if they don't if they don't use it evolution is a very tough task master Evolution will read out unnecessary traits you don't evolve a language for no reason but and I will openly say there's a lot we don't know there's a lot we're still trying to uncover it could be that tomorrow we will discover that dolphins do have a language it could be it could be there's something special about humans there is something special about us and our communication why did we evolve language where did it come from if we can figure out how humans evolved language do we dare suggest that that might be how aliens would evolve language or are they going to be two completely different pathways difficult questions I'm not I'm not going to give you any any definitive answers language doesn't leave fossils we find it very difficult to examine what happened between our ancestors who didn't have a language and the ancestors who did it's quite possible that that transition that evolutionary transition from no language to language we may never we may never know how that happened but we do know that Evolution tends to favor traits that are advantageous and so we can look at what might have been The evolutionary advantages to evolving language in our ancestors and see whether that gives us see where that gives us any any kind of Clue as to what could be driving this and there's a very interesting connection here to the question of isolation because of course communication only exists if you have both isolation and non-isolation if you're completely isolated there's no point in communicating if you're completely integrated there's no point in communicating it's only when there's a balance between the two that we get complex communication now complete integration of course doesn't exist animals that were completely integrated would know exactly what the others are thinking immediately even the cells in our body are not that integrated there's still communication between the cells in our own body and animals that were completely isolated would never have any advantage to to communicating in fact all animals communicate precisely because all animals are connected to other animals for many reasons animals interact they need to find a mate one of the Prime reasons they may come together to protect themselves against predators or to achieve some sort of communal task that they have to work on together and they have to communicate information has to flow in order for that task to be to be achieved animals that have to live in social groups have to live in social groups they can't survive outside of that social group so isolation would be fatal to them they must come together and interact and and communicate even some plants communicate so if all animals communicate why is it that only humans have evolved language well there's one Theory which is an unconvincing theory is that humans evolved language to do complex things so when we were hunting Mammoth we needed to communicate to coordinate the hunt and you'd say okay you go around that side and I'll go around this side and and you attack it from behind and and the communication gave a a concrete benefit to the activities that the humans had to do that explanation is lacking in evolutionary rigor how did we coordinate our hunts before we evolved language did we evolve language to help with our coordinated hands or did we coordinate Hans big bull because we had language there's a chick in an egg which one came first now you may say loads of animals coordinate their hunting but I've got news for you they don't coordinated hunting is extremely extremely extremely rare in the wild even wolves which I work with a lot they don't coordinate their hunts they cooperate to hunt many animals cooperate to hunt a coordination is extremely extremely extremely rare probably because of the complex communication that it that it requires now a more convincing Theory and the more accepted Theory at the moment is that our ancestors evolved very complex brains to help them live in complex societies and once our brains became sufficiently complex then they were able to support language on top of that and the kind of complexity that evolved in our brains was an understanding of isolation we were isolated in our own minds in a way that other animals aren't and by that I mean our ancestors had and we still have of course our own internal State our own internal thoughts we know what we think we know what we want we know what we're going to do and we understand that other individuals also have that and that's a key Innovation that very very very few other species have once you have that you can strategize you can manipulate you can tell other individuals some things and not others you can lie all of those abilities come from the fact that we have our own internal state which we don't share completely with others that balance between wanting to share information and wanting to keep some information to ourselves was probably very important in the way that our brains laid the foundation for for language and it's something you don't see in dolphins and and chimpanzees it's difficult to test it's something that we don't think that they have could we speculate that a similar set of constraints operated to drive evolution of language on other planets evolutionary explanations of alien life are fundamentally appealing because we don't know anything about the physical nature of alien life we don't know how the biochemistry works we don't know how big they are we don't know what temperatures they live in and so it's very difficult to make conclusions based on on the sort of gross morphology of aliens because we know nothing about it but we know that they went through evolution by natural selection the only way that complex life could have evolved I have no doubt we will find very strange very weird life that's got very weird biochemistries I mean they could be based on carbon chemistry they may not be based on carbon chemistry but if we're going to talk to them they have to have a technology so that we can communicate with them there's no way that we can span Interstellar space otherwise and if they have a technology they must come together in societies and if they come together in societies they must communicate and if they communicate their ancestors didn't have language and they do they went through that same transition and perhaps they went through the same transition for the same reasons I don't know whether alien language will have words and nouns and verbs and and grammar and so on but I do know that it will have evolved from non-language and that's quite possible in a similar way so we don't know whether or not we're isolated in the universe for now seems we are most likely the universe is teeming with life but we're still alone if there are life forms out there with whom we can communicate it's good to know that we have something in common it's good to know what it is that we share with them and what we don't the need to communicate because we live in societies where communication is part of our biology it's all the difference between being alone in the universe like you might be alone when you walk in the woods and being part of a of a galactic community of people who can who can communicate with us we send signals into space we design signals that we hope will be intercepted and interpreted by by alien civilizations and when we do that we have to design them with this idea in mind that the things that we have in common are the most basic ideas of evolution by natural selection possibly even likely probably likely that we won't find anyone to talk to In Our Lifetime we will remain alone in the universe for our lifetime we may receive messages from outer space will we be able to interpret them another difficult question and opinion is very split on this because one of the things that linguists say is absolutely essential fundamental to language is dialogue without dialogue there's no such thing as language and that may be true but how do you have a dialogue with a civilization 50 light years away take 100 years to get a reply to to anything that you say our isolation which is isolation from Alien civilizations it's also exacerbated by that physical isolation and the time it takes for for signals to to to go reach them and come back we may be surrounded by talking aliens and still and still be isolated just sort of locked in a little bubble shouldn't be disheartened by our inability to communicate with animals on Earth in the end they don't have a language of Their Own they don't need to that's not what they evolved for we should appreciate animals for what they did evolve for not what we want them to be no matter how tightly bonded we are to our pets no matter how much we can share with them and how much of what they feel we can understand in some ways they're more alien to us than a potential alien contact we ended our evolutionary history with dogs 95 million years ago the two lineages went on there on their separate ways with an alien civilization we share zero nothing nothing in common evolutionarily at all they've probably been through similar processes similar transitions similar challenges and overcome them in similar ways and I think we'll have a lot more in common with those alien interlocutors than we might have thought they may not be alone I hope not thank you thank you very much thank you very much indeed Eric for an extremely stimulating and thought-provoking talk it's now a pleasure to invite Dr Lara Pellegrini who is a research fellow at the laboratory of molecular biology and a postdoctoral research research associate at Darwin to reflect on what Eric has said to us thank you master and thank you Dr kershimon for such a fascinating lecture you have delved into the true nature of our interest in the existence of other forms of life in the universe and you reach the refreshing conclusion that the life that is special to us is related to our intrinsic desire to communicate to break out of isolation on this planet we have so far been spoiled by an abundance of life in its many forms so why are we so driven to look Beyond the Intriguing question may not be whether alien life exists but rather can we find a form of alien life with whom we can share our thoughts this after all is the purpose of language and why this is so significant to us would we only feel less alone if we discover an alien life form that can communicate can communicate with us there are two Reflections I would like to share first we should contemplate why all of us here today are find this question so intriguing perhaps some of us as scientists are interested in the biology of life and thus alien would be intrinsically fascinating however I suspect that the real answer is more complex popular culture has depicted alien life in countless books movies TV shows and video games sparking our imagination and creativity this may represent escapism or more likely it could be our desire to understand what it means to be human these stories can help Define our own place in the universe and even make us gain a greater appreciation of the diversity of Life on our planet my second thought relates to what Dr kershimon highlights in his book the zoologist's guide to like to the Galaxy that language and the ability to communicate with meaning form an integral part of our Notions about aliens language is what makes us human and it is vital to our survival as a species it is through language that we convey our thoughts emotions and ideas form connections and build relationship with others aliens and humans must be able to develop a mutual understanding for the relationship to be meaningful therefore I would conclude that the study of alien life and communication has practical implications Beyond travel to distant planets it has the potential to impact Fields such as artificial intelligence as we have seen the recent fashion for AI chat models but also psychology and even medicine and with that thank you again thank you thank you very much Lara once again if you want to read more if you want to know more about uh what Eric has told us and indeed what other speakers have told us in this series or are going to tell us you can purchase the book already on the way out they are for sale at the back of the lecture theater and you can buy them online through Amazon please do join us again next week for a lecture from Dr honik Kwong on self-imposed isolation in North Korea but before you do so join me once more in thanking Dr Eric kershenbahn very much for a really fascinating lecture [Applause]

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 6,878

Keywords: darwin college, darwin lecture series 2023, university of cambridge, isolation, dr arik kershenbaum, are we alone in the universe, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, animal vocal communication, evolution of animal communication, How Animals Talk

Id: 8Rq7Pyw1Lh4

Length: 53min 24sec (3204 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023