Alien Language: Can ET Understand Human Alphabet And Symbols?

A new book has revealed the best way to communicate with extraterrestrial life. This method is based on the idea that extraterrestrials are like humans.

For years, humans have been trying to establish contact with extraterrestrial life by sending messages into space. Many of these messages contained symbols and mathematical equations. The idea behind these kinds of messages is to first teach extraterrestrials about numeral symbols before moving to alphabets.

However, the book “Extraterrestrial Languages,” published by The MIT Press, revealed that it might be more effective if humans send simple messages that contain basic phrases instead of mathematical codes and equations.

According to the book’s author Daniel Oberhaus, his proposal is based on the idea that like humans, extraterrestrials also have a language of their own. Also, like humans, extraterrestrials are widely interested in scientific and technological discoveries such as artificial intelligence.

Although it would be easy to assume that extraterrestrials have their own set of languages, it does not automatically mean that their language follows the same grammatical structure and hierarchy as ours. This means that even if stable contact has been established, misunderstandings might still happen due to the differences between the two languages.

As a practical solution, the book suggested sending a comprehensive text explaining the natural language of humans, such as an encyclopedia. This would provide extraterrestrials with a basic idea of the words and phrases that humans use.

If extraterrestrials have already perfected artificial intelligence, they can use it in order to decipher the entire text in order to teach themselves how to use our own language.

“The best way to communicate large amounts of information may not be painstakingly designing artificial languages from scratch, but sending a large corpus of natural language text, such as an encyclopedia,” Oberhaus wrote in a post to Wired.

“This is how we train natural language algorithms on Earth, which tease out the rules of human language by statistically analyzing large collections of text,” he continued. “If ET has developed its own AI, it could potentially decipher the structure of a natural language message.”