M.J. Rose

The Rosetta stone, now displayed at the British Museum in London, was used by Jean-Francois Champollion to decipher Egyptian heiroglyphics. The same message is given in three different scripts. Hieroglyphics (top) and Demotic (middle) were both ways of writing the ancient Egyptian language. The third script is Greek (bottom), which Champollion knew. It is a useful example of what we may need to engage in interstellar communication, Credit: Hans Hillewaert, British Museum

“On television and in the movies, it’s so easy. Aliens almost always speak English (at least in America they do). If it’s explained at all, we are typically told that they learned it by intercepting communications with our astronauts, or tapping into our television broadcasts. A universal translator device instantly abolishes communication difficulties. Hollywood aliens are, of course, human beings in costumes (these days augmented by computer graphics). They are equipped, as are we all, with a human brain, a human larynx, and human vocal cords; all singular products of the distinctive evolutionary history of our species.

Real extraterrestrials, if they exist, will be the product of a different evolutionary history, played out on another world.

They will know no human language, and be unfamiliar with the typical activities of human beings. Here on Earth no archeologist has ever deciphered an ancient script without knowing the language it corresponds to, even though such scripts deal with recognizable human activities. How could we ever devise a message that aliens could understand? Could we ever understand a message they sent to us? Communicating with alien minds may be one of the most daunting challenges the human intellect has ever faced.

In mid-November, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California sponsored an academic conference on the problem interstellar communication ‘Communicating across the Cosmos’…”

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