For many, a newspaper headline such as “Extraterrestrial Civilization Discovered” would be one of the most exciting, challenging and profound events in human history.
Of course, the simplest thing is not for a ship to land in the middle of the Zarzuela but for a message to reach us. However, some scientists have drawn attention to the difficult and extraordinarily hard work it would be to confirm without possible ambiguity that it really is a signal whose origin is an extraterrestrial civilization: it is not as easy as on Independence Day .
We have the proof in what happened in February 1992, when two teams set out to play a peculiar role-playing game: simulating the first contact between humans and aliens. Responsible for this game was a non-profit organization called Contact , and the approach was very simple: two teams, one human and one alien. The first was to interpret the message of the extraterrestrial team, for which he had been working hard for a year.
The human team, made up of about 16 people, was also connected via email with a large number of potential consultants. Everything seemed ready, but the first transmission, the first contact with an alien race, went to waste. The reason? The aliens had used PC computers while the humans used MacIntosh. It did not occur to anyone to incorporate the necessary software to be able to move from one type of computer to another. Everyone learned the moral: if our computers had problems communicating with each other, what other unimaginable will appear when we try to communicate with real aliens?
Is science a universal language?
The faith dogma of scientists looking for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations, the so-called SETI program, is that we can come to understand each other because science and math are universal: aliens will write 2 + 2 in many different ways, but it will always be 4, and the law of universal gravitation will always go with the inverse of the square of the distance, whatever the language used.
Of course, this optimism bordering on the euphoria for science is not shared by those who do not come from the hard sciences . As early as the mid-1960s, University of Chicago historian William MacNeill unnerved scientists by openly doubting the ability of human beings to decipher any signals of extraterrestrial origin because our intelligence relies heavily on language, and ET will have another language without points of union with ours.
Physicists and astronomers argue that the common language with ET is science . Or put another way, that when we come into contact we will be able to harmonize their science with ours. Now, how to determine if they have a scientific language and practice? One of the unsolved problems in the philosophy of science is how to distinguish what is science and what is not. For example, in Mozambique, the Mbamba people have been able to identify among the hundreds of behaviors of the so-called honey-bird, those that the little animal uses to take them to where the beehives are. But for this they have not carried out any type of scientific study, nor have they been based on the hypothetical-deductive model used by Western science. They have reached this ethological result by another way . If this happens on our planet, how strange will it not be on another? And if we cannot distinguish what is science and what is not here, on Earth, how can we do it with a culture with which we have nothing to do?
Are we able to understand an ET message?
This almost religious devotion of physicists and engineers for a universal science usually smells like burnt horn to philosophers of science, as it happens to Nicholas Rescher. When asked about this belief, he dismisses it as deeply provincial to believe that there is only one natural world and only one science to explain it . Rescher considers the universe to be singular but subject to many and very diverse interpretations, and identifies three conditions that must be met in order to claim that alien science is functionally equivalent to our own. First, the formulation: their mathematics has to be like ours. Second, the orientation: they must be interested in the same type of problems that we are. And third, conceptualization: they must have the same cognitive perspective of nature as we do. In other words, science is not something infused, but is anchored in the way we perceive the world, cultural heritage, which determines what is interesting, and its ecological niche, which determines what is useful.
Hence, even saying that an extraterrestrial civilization is more advanced than ours is a mistake : for that they must do a type of science similar to ours. Rescher accepts that science produces unique knowledge about the structure of reality, but denies that we can equate human science with a science created by radically different beings. Physicists Robert Rood and James Trefil have made it abundantly clear: “an alien science book would be as incomprehensible to us as a radio circuit diagram would be to an Aboriginal.”
Despite everything, suppose we are able to determine that what we have detected is an emission from another civilization. Would we understand something of the message? There is no Rossetta stone for communication with ET and given our inability to decipher languages -very terrestrial- such as linear A, Cretan hieroglyphics, that of the Indus civilization or the rongorongo of Easter Island, to think that we are going to have The best luck with an alien language is to be very optimistic: things are not as easy as they are presented to archaeologist Daniel Jackson in the TV series Stargate . To give an example, something as simple as the speed at which we speak, at which we generate information. In the case of human language, it is between the song of a bird and that of a whale, but how will that of aliens be? Knowing how fast you speak is essential to understanding grammatical structures. How can we decipher a message if we don’t even know how fast they speak?
References:
Kershenbaum, A. (2021) The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, Penguin Books
Oberhaus, D. (2019) Extraterrestrial languages, MIT Press
