But the course of evolution on ET’s planet will still be bound by the same physical laws, and ET will face the same fundamental constraints on time, energy, and resources. There is a good chance that ET’s planet will be quite a bit different from our own, and the species there will adapt accordingly. In other words, we’re not going to discover a planet inhabited by sentient ice cubes. This is not to say that evolution is deterministic (random events like asteroid impacts and genetic mutations still happen), but that the number of evolutionary end points isn’t limitless. Astrobiologist Charles Cockell makes this argument in his recent book, The Equations of Life, in which he points to the remarkable similarities across species on Earth-from the fact that life is cellular and arises from the same four nucleotides, to the structure of an eye or a wing. Although languages tend to be analogized as a form of software running on the hardware of our brain, recent work in neurolinguistics suggests that language-and the universal grammar-is actually an expression of the hardware itself.īiology, after all, is beholden to the laws of physics, which puts constraints on the trajectory of evolution. In other words, whether it will also obey the universal grammar, the hierarchical, recursive structure that linguist Noam Chomsky has argued is the deep structure common to all human languages. As Minsky argued on several occasions, ET is likely to have language because language is an ideal solution to the fundamental problems faced by any intelligent species-namely constraints on time, energy, and resources.Ī deeper question is whether ET’s language will be similar to our own. Both Minsky and McCarthy had a deep interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which they realized had a lot in common with their own search for artificial intelligence. That was where Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, two of the progenitors of artificial intelligence, landed after they became interested in interstellar communication. But if ET does in fact think like a human, does that alien also have some kind of human-like language? It’s an elegant solution to a difficult problem, but Lincos still rests on the assumption that an ET is “human-like in its mental state,” as Freudenthal once conceded. An earlier version of the language was first sent into space in 1999 and again in 2003 as part of the Cosmic Call messages-a crowd-sourced interstellar messaging project that marked the first serious attempt at interstellar communication since Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sent the Arecibo message into space 25 years earlier. This custom symbolic system begins by introducing ET to numerals, and then progresses to more complex topics like human biology and the planets in our solar system. Although both transmissions were billed as a “ music lesson for aliens,” the second broadcast was notable for rehabilitating an extraterrestrial language developed by the physicists Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas in the late 1990s. This was the second iteration of Sónar Calling GJ273b, an interstellar messaging project by the nonprofit METI International that began in 2017. Each message consisted of a selection of short songs and a primer on how to interpret the contents. Over the course of three days, the radar broadcast a message toward the planet in the hopes that there might be something, or someone, there to receive it. ↑ File:Ben Still Speaks English in Alien Form.In May 2018, a radar facility in Tromsø, Norway, trained its antennas on GJ237b, a potentially habitable exoplanet located 12 light years from Earth.
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