On deciphering the language of the aliens
of Bellicosity 3, our linguists assured us they didn’t even have a word for war. Unfortunately for our embassy, it turned out
they had 50 different words for various types of war. So today we continue our discussion of hypothetical
alien civilizations by taking a look at how we might go about deciphering their language. We looked at this very quickly in the first
contact episode last month but we didn’t get into the nuts and bolts much, and today
we will explore it a bit more in depth. To do that we will take two approaches. First we will contemplate how we might decipher
our own language if we were them, and then we will look at some of the stranger ways
aliens might communicate that have been proposed. What we will see is that this is not an easy
thing, but that it should be possible. Folks contemplating alien language tend to
either oversimplify it and assume it is a lot like our own, often assuming it resembles
English more than most other human languages do that don’t share that linguistic ancestry,
or say it is going to be totally indecipherable. The former is obviously wrong but the latter
probably is too. I’ll give an example of indecipherable reasoning. You would say that me gesturing at my chest
and saying Isaac tells most humans that is my name, but as far as an alien is concerned
I might be saying I am hungry or this is my territory or pointing at my shirt to tell
you what color it is, or even “look at my shirt, isn’t it awesome?” The problem with assuming aliens are incredibly
alien is that people tend to take it too far while still assuming things. They throw their hands up at such examples
because they think that I could be referring to a hundreds things, which I could be, but
that isn’t the problem. The mistake in the logic chain by the way
is that the alien even realizes I am pointing at myself. If it isn’t a two-legged, two armed critter
like ourselves it has no special reason to assume my gesture means anything at all from
a communication standpoint. I am crooking my arm at myself, that’s great,
I might be bending one leg too because my left foot is sore and I’m favoring my right. That obviously indicates something, I have
a sore foot, but it is linguistically irrelevant. If the alien figures out that you pointing
at your chest means something, you’re already halfway victorious in your communication battle. You’ve established you are trying to communicate
and two of the ways you do that, gesturing and speaking. And it doesn’t matter a hill of beans if
the alien doesn’t know that me pointing at my chest means I’m telling it my name. If it has any concept for the idea of a name
in the first place, that will be on its list of things it thinks I might have said. If it doesn’t, then that will be one of
the big question marks on the giant matrix of matching up that will be done. We will have shared concepts, probably not
all but many will exist for both of us. Complete translation may be impossible but
a working translation of most concepts should be. Both species probably have a word for star,
water, air, clouds, numbers, distance, time, food, waste and so on. One or both parties is going to have access
to massive computers and teams of experts who are going to be correlating everything
and trying every iteration till they hit matches, even partial matches. There are going to be big differences, things
that just won’t meaningfully translate, but there will be a ton of overlap too. This will be particularly difficult if none
of their senses used for communication at least partially match up to our own, if they
don’t use vision or sound at all for communication but just radio waves, but that should match
up to sound enough to be analogous for comprehension. Now some would argue that you can’t learn
a language completely or even enough to grasp part of it if limited to just sound, for instance,
like if you were locked up in a room and your captors spoke a foreign language and you could
hear them but not see them. You don’t know if one guard is saying good
morning to the other or telling him shirt is dirty or commiserating that his dog has
died. You’ll pick up some stuff but others will
elude you because you have no context. You can’t see his shirt. Now there is some truth to this but it is
also wrong, and more so with radio signals. We will ignore for the moment that we emit
more than just audio, that we also emit TV signals, because the first thing aliens should
hear from us is radio-only. Both signals travel at the same speed and
we began sending the one many years before the other. Aliens would have many years of audio-only
before they got our first TV signals. Now the flaw here in assuming you can’t
learn the language by listening to it is that it simply is not considering what you can
do with some creativity, a large enough sample of data, and tools like frequency analysis. Frequency of patterns in the data, not the
frequency of the radio signal. This is very like the basic tools of simple
cryptography. If I am given an encrypted book I know is
in English and that each letter has been swapped with one specific letter, an A is a J and
a D is Q for instance, I can crack that code very quickly. I know the two most common three letter word
in English tends to be ‘The’ followed by ‘And’, so whichever three letter combinations
occurs the most is probably The, and then And, and from this I now know 6 of the 26
letters. Simply by observing the frequency of an expected
word we are able to find it. Consider our guards, odds are good one of
the most common words said whenever two of them beginning speaking, when the voices change,
is going to be a greeting, and the last word a good-bye. When they bring him his meals, odds are good
they discuss things relating to food. “Take the prisoner his meal”, “Pass
me that plate”, “That smells good”, thing like that. Now a human by themselves might not be able
to figure it out even over years, just from those occasional remarks, but when we are
talking about decades of radio signals from dozens of sources at once, being analyzed
by experts with all the appropriate tools, the game changes. Because a decade of listening to a radio channel
will produce nearly a billion words spoken and we have multiple radio channels. That is a big sample to work with and far
more than most archeologists and linguists have when trying to crack ancient dead languages. So we should ask ourselves what almost all
radio signals contain? First and foremost, the time and day. This does not need to be explicitly announced,
but the same folks will come on at the same time each day, rapidly telling you that there
is some 24 hour long period of significance. Even if they come from a tidally locked planet
they will know many planets rotate and guess that is the length of ours. Incidentally they will be able to deduce this
if their equipment is good enough, along with our year length, by the small red and blue
shifts of the signals being emitted. The speed of the transmitters relative to
them is changing based on time of year and day. You could even figure out north and south
and axial tilt from that, and produce a pretty accurate map of the planet, at least in terms
of where people live and what language the people living there speak. Regardless they will now know our day length
and also rapidly conclude we have a seven day week, that there is a 5 day and 2 day
block of some sort of significance, and that the day is broken into 24 hour long periods. They will also notice that the word Monday
is used a lot on the first day of that 5-day period, Tuesday the next, and so on. All just by frequency analysis. They will know most of our words for time
and date and month and likely our number system too just by that. Will it get them the whole language? Definitely not. There will be some words they probably can’t
catch, and for that matter there are tons of words we almost never use. But they only need the active language, which
is often only 10 or 20 thousand words and they don’t need all of that either. Obscure words we don’t use much aren’t
necessary, Earth-specific terms like coffee don’t have to be entirely clear to them,
and doubtless euphemisms will seriously screw with them even if they have their own, but
a good grasp should be possible anyway. I looked at some lists of the most commonly
used words and picked some at random to try to figure out how someone might figure them
out just from a radio signal and two that stuck out to me were ‘he’ and ‘she’,
along with his and her. How could you possibly figure out gender pronouns
just from hearing us, not seeing us? Then I went ‘duh’ and remembered that
just about every radio announcer is going to use them to reference either a song they
are playing or a news soundclip or just to announce who is on for the next hour. Loosely speaking men and women have rather
noticeably different voices. They might not know the specific differences
but they will know it has to be significant if Group A and Group B literally have a different
word for each other. But they might figure those out too. For instance they will hear the term cat and
dog and used in conjunction with each other and the term pet. They should not know much else about them
just from that, though they will know they have paws and whiskers and fur and that humans
do not, even if they don’t know what those are. But as their vocabulary builds up they might
figure it out from the occasional detailed reference, like a radio announcer complaining
about his dog coming in and leaving muddy paw prints all over the kitchen floor. Now they might misunderstand that too. They’ve figured out that we keep and prepare
food in the kitchen and that we are omnivores and think cats and dogs are a type of livestock,
but they’d also wonder why we use tones and expressions and attitudes for them like
we do our children. So you might have some thinking and arguing
cat or dog was a larval form of human and other who thought they were livestock and
some thinking we cannibalized our young, but there are so many insistencies with all three
ideas that they probably will puzzle out that we have a limited symbiotic relationship with
some creatures. They will be constantly arguing and revising
all sorts of things. They will also have a list of their own words
they think we probably will have a word for and will be trying to match them up. It won’t take them long to match up words
like listen, listener, and audience considering how often those words are used on radio, if
the aliens have speech and ears themselves. They should be able to pick out the words
for sunrise and sunset pretty quickly, because they will know the time of our day those words
should be more frequently used, which will let them figure out Sun pretty quick. They’ll notice breakfast, lunch, and dinner
get used at certain times of day the most and get used a lot with words like food and
eat and hungry. It is a huge puzzle you are fitting the pieces
together for where you will have to often move pieces later on. Don’t mistake me here, I am definitely not
saying accurate translation is easy, just possible. Aliens ought to know us first by our audio-only
radio, as I mentioned, it will always reach them first with TV signals coming some years
later. And when those begin arriving I’m sure they
will have some surprises. “I’ll be damned” One of their linguists
will say, “I knew the word duck meant both an animal and action, but I always figured
the animal would exhibit some sort of behavior related to that action. Which I assumed meant to burrow down into
the ground. Yet this duck-creature never burrows, in fact
it swims, and it can fly, just like the squirrel. Heck, I don’t even see any claws on humans
for burrowing, they must be retractable. Yes, we know they have claws, I keep telling
you they have to have them because they constantly say they do. Humans are always talking about getting their
claws into things.” Now of course any alien listening only to
our radio will have a tough time of it, and may find anything like a complete translation
impossible until TV arrives a couple decades later, but they will be able to put together
a pretty complete language after that. We can thank people’s tendency to be pedantic
or long-winded at times that they will likely make more progress than we might expect. There’s a bit under 10,000 hours in a year,
so a dozen or so radio channels broadcasting 24/7 for a decade produces about a million
hours of radio, each having about 10,000 words spoken. That’s about 10 billion words and odds are
some were someone talking about something in excessively boring detail. All it takes is one time for someone to say
“Our power plants need U-235 not U-238, we have to refine and enrich the uranium we
find” and every physicist in the Universe is going to look up from that sharply and
say “he’s talking about fission power, uranium is their word for things with 92 protons
in it. Show me every other word they use more frequently
when discussing this and I will probably be able to tell you what it means.” Every specialist field will be able to do
that trick, and for that one all that was probably needed was the 235 and 238. It’s just frequency analysis, those two
numbers getting used in proximity enough times to each other is going to get marked down
and when shown to chemist or physicist they will probably trigger that and they’ll be
able to say it very likely that is what is being referred to and all the puzzles pieces
nearby that will start falling into place and you can expand from there. You’ll miss some, mess some up, and some
just won’t translate at all, but you will keep widening and refining your picture. If they still haven’t cracked most of everything
in that first couple decades, then TV arrives and radios get more common and in a couple
decades their inventory will contain trillions of words and millions of hours of video. Keep in mind, while we do have ancient written
languages from the dawn of history we still have not translated, that’s mostly because
we maybe have a few thousand words, many of which are scavenged half intact from stuff
written or engraved by hand, spanning centuries. Words change with time and distance, symbols
and letters can even change, and you don’t have much standardization. They’d have many, many billions of examples
of just one regional dialect from one short time period. Of course they first have to figure out what
the signal is saying. They will notice the pattern almost instantly
but figuring out that it is supposed to be turned into an audio signal at certain frequencies
and speeds is harder than it sounds like. They should know it needs converting, their
biologists can tell them how unlikely radio waves are to be used for natural communication
even if they don’t use sound to speak themselves. But vibrations of air, and the ability to
hear that, ought to be a fairly common thing. Any place with an atmosphere, which is probably
just about every place technological life evolved, is likely to have creatures which
make noise when walking around and it definitely helps to have a mechanism for being aware
something is bumping into things, even if you’ve got 360 degree vision. They also have very good odds of being able
to look at our planet once they get the signal and determine the composition of that atmosphere,
which tells you a lot about how sounds work there. For TV it is actually a bit easier, it gets
kind of blindingly obvious what the aspect ratio of the images is supposed to be. Those early ones will all be in black and
white which is going to help too. Though they might get thrown for a bit by
assuming we have monochromatic vision. When they get the color version they might
get thrown again since those are not exactly color, they are three monochromatic images
over top each other and the signal hardly says ‘I am the color red, which you would
know as a wavelength of as 600 nanohooves.” And it won’t help if they themselves are
dichromatic critters, ones who only see two colors which is the case for most mammals,
and those happen to be yellow and near-ultraviolet. That’s where the scientists do their detective
work and start trying to guess from materials in the image and the ambient lighting what
frequencies we’re showing. Tricky but doable, they will after all know
exactly what wavelengths of light our sun produces and probably our atmosphere’s makeup,
and if they didn’t they will now. They might get a glimpse of a lightbulb and
say ‘That’s gotta be Tungsten, we can back calculate the illumination it is giving
off and tell you what colors these are’. Assuming they have eyeballs of course. Without those they might still figures out
that it is moving pictures just as a blind person can read brail. But we should ask ourselves what senses aliens
might have because any communication that doesn’t involve sort of direct link akin
to telepathy or being wired together ought to operate using one or more of those. And it will tend to be one you can produce
a high bandwidth exchange in. For instance we can communicate by scents
but mostly don’t, even if we could produce a range of smells at will and had the olfactory
senses of dogs, this would still be far too low bandwidth to be of much use. Scents take time to percolate around, traveling
maybe a meter per second, compared to the speed of sound, hundreds of meters per second,
or light, which is a million times faster than sound. Now I know many of you are now amusing yourself
thinking of the most obvious way humans would produce smells on command, but we will bypass
that an assume we could only communicate by smell, some especially weird prison setup
that passed scents but not sight or sound. You could create a code if you had a typical
bathroom sink cabinet of various scents. Rose oil, lavender, eucalyptus, and some others,
we’ll say 36 total, one for each letter and number. You could now uncap each one at a time for
a few seconds and let it waft to your neighbor to write a sentence, then capping it and letting
it clear. If everyone has wonderful senses of smell
you might be able to get out a word a minute. If that’s all you’ve got, you use it,
but it isn’t all we got. We usually speak 120-180 words a minute. And obviously you need air for a sense of
smell which means you can smack your hand against something even if you have no vocal
cords and produce a Morse code beat. And you’d probably be sensitive to a wide
range of sounds and able to discriminate those decently, allowing you to use several different
sounds so you don’t have to do binary. So it is unlikely anyone communicates in smells,
for high-speed conversations anyway, obviously many animals use this for prolonged lasting
communication, like marking their territory. They still bark or meow or such too. You could have a written language that used
persistent smells that you wrote by making dots of that smell and they ran their noses
across to read it, but it probably wouldn’t be their main means of communicating. No vision combined with a rough sense of touch
could eliminate the option of images, engraved or strictly visual as a persistent, written
language. They might speak, there is air, but that is
hard to use for written words. So smell and taste are not good methods of
communication, they are both senses we’d expect to see develop a lot but they are low-speed,
low-bandwidth, low range. Same for touch. You need to be touching someone to use that. It could be insanely high bandwidth with the
right architecture, potentially letting you use someone’s skin like a giant keyboard. If you tattooed a keyboard onto your arm for
people to push on you could potentially communicate decently quickly that way, especially if you
had way higher resolution, thousands of keys as it were, and they had dozens or hundreds
of little fingers or tentacles that could be simultaneously pressing many things. When phone gets discovered you stick your
arm in a tele-type machine that smacks your arm-keyboard. The problem is it only works when touching,
and good speech should have range. Sound isn’t as fast or high resolution as
sight but it can go around corners and obstacles, and both a very quick. Vibrations move through air fast and faster
through a lot of other materials like water, where it moves five times faster than air
and often that fast or faster in most minerals and rock. Light obviously moves quite quickly. The sight of you moving your hand, or the
noise of your hand slapping down on something, simply occurs faster than the air moved by
your hand like a fan or the smells on it. It gets to the destination faster and also
clears faster. They tend not to linger around interfering
with follow up information. So while we can imagine using our other senses
for communication or people having other senses, we are beginning to see how the Universe pushes
you toward using those sights or physical vibrations if you want to talk fast, and you
do. We have five primary senses, we use 2 of them,
sight and sound, for communication because they allow the best range and bandwidth. We can use one or both. Yet I can communicate by touch, the calming
or comforting hand on the shoulder or a hug or a shove, but these don’t offer us the
speed and detail the others do, so we don’t use it as our primary means of communication. You want to be able to talk almost as fast
as you think. If you want to develop technology you need
to be able to do pass information quickly over distances, but it also isn’t coincidental
that most critters on our planet with brains bigger than a grain of sand use sight and
sound for communication. Those are also both very easy evolutionary
adaptation paths too. A nerve being sensitive to light or vibration
is actually quite simple, converting light into an electric signal or vibration into
an electric signal is not a huge jump. Indeed, the complex image forming eyeball
is thought to have independently evolved around a hundred times, and since the only way you
can realistically get dense and complex ecosystems is if they are powered by sunlight and surrounded
by some fluid, water, air, etc, these two systems of detection are probably present
just about anywhere you’d find a large brain. If not both than probably one or the other. An alien might communicate electrically or
magnetically, we do have creatures on Earth sensitive to magnetics like homing pigeons
or able to give off electricity like electric eels. That is another sense available that we might
see evolve into a pretty high resolution means of perception and possibly communication. That might seem a lot like telepathy too,
but if you start looking for electric or magnetic signals you’ll see it. I am skipping telepathy by the way, its common
in fiction but except for where it is referring to something physical like radio signals exchanged
between two critters I consider it non-scientific. Physics limits us to not many realistic means
of communication. At least on what you might call the spoken
end of things, where you are attempting real time communication with someone who is capable
of moving around. When it comes to their written language, or
the actual way they transmit information with sight or sound, we’ve got a lot of options. You might have peacocks who evolve an especially
complex fan dance to speak, rippling colors in specific patterns, and while they can communicate
with noise too, they have no complex vocal cords so their speech is limited pretty much
to ‘look at me so I can speak to you’. Sign language is definitely an option, though
it also helps to be able to clap your hands to get someone’s attention first. A good reminder there that it helps to have
a complete language for each sense you use, since sign language lets me talk to people
when I don’t want to make noise, something a lot of group predators would want even if
they had complex vocal cords, so they don’t alert prey. Anything you can manipulate fast can be used
for communication, slow things too but you have that bandwidth issue. You can’t change smells fast as we pointed
out. I think I joked in the Fermi Paradox Solutions
episode way, way back that an intelligent cloud might think we were communicating with
it by growing crops in certain patterns. Obviously that can be done but it is very
slow and smart creatures are not slow. It is fun to contemplate something that is
intelligent but thinks in years not seconds, but let’s be realistic here. It took us millions of generations to go from
the simplest multicellular life to what we are now, and those took billion of generations
to get that complex. The Universe is only 14 billion years old
and even if your planet formed just a few billions years into things, you probably won’t
have evolved intelligence yet if your generations take thousands of years each. So smart means fast, and we see in our own
languages a constant effort to cram more information into a smaller message. All those irritating text-messaging short
hands are a great modern example. We also can say that the language will need
to be very versatile. I don’t mean conceptually, able to add new
concepts as they arise, that too, but rather where and when you can use it. We instantly convert to a loud, low bandwidth
yell when trying to speak to each other when there’s a lot of ambient sound, like while
watching a band play, and tend to make gestures more. That’s a simple example, but our written
language is not pen and paper, I can make those marks on virtually anything with anything
else, and it’s a persistent message. Carving a sentence into a cliff face takes
a lot of time but you can do it and we can all read it. Our peacock-like alien example who communicated
by fanning their feathers might develop their persistent language, their writing, as a series
of colored stones or leaves arranged in patterns to mimic the language. A species that could see in mid-range infrared
might communicate by selectively widening or contracting arteries to warm certain parts
of their body to make visual patterns, but they couldn’t use that for writing because
things would cool down. The pointing of writing is to communicate
with some across time after all. You write things down for people who aren’t
there now, or maybe so you can hand it to them so they can remember later. So these guys might draw symbols to represent
those body heat patterns or they might go for pictographs. Or maybe they are hugely radiation resistant
because their planet has a ridiculous amount of enriched uranium lying around and that,
not the sun, is what fuels life and they mix the stuff up in ink to make warm glowing text
that stays warm for centuries from passive fission decay. There are a near infinite number of options,
but most are not that indecipherable in and of themselves. So some alien with a fifty eyeballs communicates
by blinking a pattern, you could have an entire language where each word represented one pattern
of closed and open eyelids. That’s handy but you and I would notice
that almost right away, and they should figure out almost right away that you only have two
eyes. Knowing this they know you either don’t
use rapid blinking or you do it very slowly, and they should realize you do it too slowly
for it to be an effective means of communication. They will then ask what alternates means you
have for faster communication and even if they don’t have ears to hear your voice,
they will probably learn to lip read you very fast. They are, after all, already used to staring
at the face region to look for complex patterns. When determining an alien communication method
you look at its biology and ask what it can quickly and easily do that it can also detect,
then try to see patterns in that. But they will probably be visual or auditory,
maybe electromagnetic, which vision actually is anyway. One big thing to remember though is that you
probably can never speak an alien tongue, since quite probably they won’t have tongues. What you’re probably really going to be
doing is teaching each other’s computers to talk to each other. Odds are those will be much better at understanding
each other. If you can teach a computer to speak your
language, to actually speak it and hear it, then it should be able to explain that to
their computers if theirs can too, and to comprehend what it is saying. Obviously those need to be better than the
computers we have now. But even if their computers use balanced ternary
instead of binary, they should be able to talk easier. The big concept of course is that you just
keep trying things till something clicks and just keep dumping brain power into refining
it. You will have things in common, they ought
to have some word for star, if by some chance they don’t, then maybe they’ve got one
circle or square or the number three. It won’t ever be easy but it should be doable. If they want to understand they probably will,
and if they are anything like us they’d probably build up a lot of empathy in the
process, and view us in a more favorable light. Sometimes language barriers actually help
people get along. Okay, we will leave off there for today. Next week we will be looking at Interstellar
Highways. Thin connections of lasers or charged particles
linking solar systems and allowing fast and cheap travel between them. Make sure to subscribe to the channel for
alerts when that and other episodes come out, and if you enjoyed this episode, please like
it and share it with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
