Mike Storm – The Symposium (wav)

How could you devise a message for intelligent creatures from another planet? They wouldn’t know any human language. Their ‘speech’ might be as different from ours as the eerie cries of whales or the twinkling lights of fireflies. Their cultural and scientific history would have followed its own path. Their minds might not even work like ours. Would the deep structure of language, its so called ‘universal grammar’ be the same for aliens as for us?

If we want to construct and transmit messages to the planets of relatively nearby stars, hoping for a response. We can design interstellar messages that can be understood by non-human minds. But the question is of whether the deep underlying structure of language would likely be the same for extraterrestrials as for us?

We think that alien creatures might function together as a collective mind. But we doubts, though, that such an entities could evolve human-like technological intelligence without trigger a runaway explosion of intelligence. We will be able to understand aliens, only if “it turns out that the evolution of extraterrestrial life forms is highly convergent with our own”.

If extraterrestrial civilizations exist, the nearest is probably at least hundreds or thousands of light years away. Still, the greatest gulf that we will have to bridge to communicate with extraterrestrials is not such distances, but the gulf between human and alien minds.