We are many people who believe that alien civilizations exist and there is always for us the question of whether we will deal with them in the near future, or in the very distant future but there is always the curiosity to think about how we could talk to aliens ?
We are going to put to work the imagination and suppose that suddenly we are with the members of an alien species, thus face to face. Surely the first thing that would happen to us in the head is to express to them that we come in peace hahahaha, as it is what we have seen in many works of fiction and the suspicions of some illustrious scientists such as Stephen Hawking), but the question is, would we be able to understand each other?
Yes we will be able to assume that we will have the capacity to transmit scientific information with these beings, since if the laws of the universe are the same everywhere, then the different descriptions of these laws should be, in principle, equivalent. That is the thinking behind initiatives such as the SETI (intelligent extraterrestrial life search) and METI (messages to extraterrestrial intelligences projects).
But the situation is complicated when we enter the field of language, which is the most important factor in collaboration between human beings. We are able to work together in large groups when communicating our intentions. For this reason, it is logical to assume that any technologically versatile alien civilization will have something like what we call language.
Another question that we must ask ourselves is: Are we capable of aspiring to learn an extraterrestrial language?
There would be several barriers to consider, and the first obstacle could be the means. We communicate in a range of sound frequencies from 82 to 255 hertz, and in a range of light frequencies from 430 to 770 terahertz. It is unlikely that it is the case of the aliens, because they will have had a very different evolution. However, the problem is mainly technical. The songs of the whales, which are inaudible to humans, can be captured by accelerating them, and it shows that it is relatively easy to translate alien stimuli into things that humans can perceive.
Truly, the question here is whether we would have the ability to understand and understand the internal structure of an alien language and, consequently, learn it. In that sense, the psychology of language offers us two very different perspectives namely:
- The generativist perspective
She argues that the structure of language is encoded in our brain, suggests that we would not be able to do so. He argues that humans possess a universal grammar of their own, innate in each of us, that has a certain number of parameters, each related to the acceptable order in which words, and parts of words, can be ordered in any language. The language we hear, at the beginning of life, activates one of these parameters that allows us to distinguish between valid and invalid forms of combining words.
For generativists it is very unlikely that an alien species has the same language parameters as a human being. They conclude that if an extraterrestrial landed on our planet and spoke a language that violates universal grammar, we would not be able to learn that language the same way we learn other languages such as English or Chinese, because we are designed to learn those languages, but not to learn languages that can be perfectly usable but that violate universal grammar.
- The cognitive perspective sees semantics (structures of meaning) as something much more important than syntax (grammar structures). According to this point of view, a phrase such as "earth eats cowardice" is syntactically well formed, but lacks any semantic meaning. Advocates of that vision understand that grammar alone is not enough to understand a language. It needs to be associated with the knowledge of the concepts that structure how the users of that language think. Cognitive vision gives us hope that human and alien languages can be mutually understandable.
Some even argue that the most advanced human concepts are constructed from basic blocks that are common to other species, such as the notion of the past and the future, similarity and difference, and the concepts of agent and object.
If aliens manipulate objects, interact with their peers and combine concepts, the cognitive perspective predicts that there might be enough mental architecture in common for their language to be understood by humans. It is unlikely that an extraterrestrial species that reproduces biologically lacks concepts to distinguish genetically related groups from those that are not.
It is a bit difficult to answer that question and to know if the cognitive perspective (or the generativist) is correct. Studies on neural networks show that languages can be learned without having specialized structures in the brain.
However, it is important because it means that it is not necessary to pose an innate universal grammar to explain how we acquire the ability of the language. It also seems that there are human languages that do not fit into the universal framework of grammar. Although the results are far from conclusive (for example, it has not been possible to explain why only humans seem to have a language), the evidence points more towards the cognitive current.
So it's not that crazy to assume that humans could learn alien languages. Of course, surely we would find aspects of an extraterrestrial language that would be inaccessible to us (like our poetry). In the same way, some species may occupy a mental universe so different that it is only equivalent to that of humans on a very general level. In any case, it seems that we can be somewhat optimistic and think that the universal structures in the worlds of the physical, the biological and the social would be sufficient to anchor human and alien languages in a common semantic framework.
Seen from this perspective, perhaps it is good news that at the moment we have not found aliens because we could say so many things that we want, of course, if they are out there.