The Debrief: When you wrote your book, “
The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves,” you seemed to be focused on the fundamental elements of and definition of language. There is currently a growing public interest in the possibility of contact with a non-human intelligence at some point. But what was your focus? Was it more about the possible challenges of establishing communication with a hypothetical non-human intelligence, or more of an effort to define how we think of language and communications in general?
Dr. Arik Kershenbaum: The two are inextricably linked. When we think of establishing communication with another human culture – i.e. learning another language – we don’t need to make any conceptual leaps. All human languages are just minor variations on a theme. But if you want to communicate with a non-human intelligence, you can no longer rely on what you instinctively understand about “language.” That will necessarily be constrained to our understanding of human language, and may not in any way resemble the communication system of a dolphin, or a bird, or even of an alien. So we can’t even understand the challenges of inter-species communication, without getting to the bottom of what is the fundamental nature of language, and of communication in general. Actually, we’re very familiar with this idea. When you communicate with your pet dog, you don’t (usually) expect him or her to understand full sentences. But you know how to convey everything from commands to emotions, and even simple questions. Next time you do that, examine what you’re doing. You’ll see it’s nothing like any human language that we know. But it’s still meaningful communication.
TD: And do you find the idea of a non-terrestrial intelligence that may have visited the Earth plausible?
AK: This just seems incredibly unlikely to me. The energy and technology required to
travel between the stars is so vast that any civilization capable of visiting us must be hugely more advanced than we are. In that case, if they wanted to remain unknown, we would certainly never know about them at all. If, on the other hand, they wanted to be known, they certainly wouldn’t have anything to fear from us. So they would just walk up to the White House (or, in the much more plausible scenario of Robert Sawyer’s book, “Calculating God,” up to the steps of a really good natural history museum). Given that, I don’t see why alien spaceships should be appearing occasionally and randomly in the skies, as has been suggested. It worries me that, in an age when we are genuinely redoubling our efforts to detect and understand extraterrestrial life, we should be distracted by a set of phenomena that may indeed be unexplained, but are actually far less interesting!
TD: Anyone who has read
your recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal could come away with the impression that you are skeptical of the idea that non-human animals on Earth have “languages” in the sense that humans do, or at least that their languages are very limited. People like Dr. Denise Herzing have been studying the language of dolphins for virtually their entire careers. To explain this for the layman, if dolphins, with their very large brains and apparently complex series of clicks, whistles, pulses, and buzzing sounds have a simplistic “language,” how is it that we’ve apparently never managed to exchange a single, meaningful question and answer with one of them? Is the challenge too great, or are dolphins simply not smart enough?
AK: The definition of what exactly is and isn’t a language is probably less important than the concept: we humans seem to have something in our communication that no other species has. My own definition is that to be called a “language,” a communication system should have the ability to convey an unlimited number of different concepts. We don’t believe that other animals can do that. But I don’t have a problem if people prefer to call the complex communication of dolphins and apes “language.” The reason that we haven’t managed to exchange a single meaningful question with a dolphin is probably more to do with the fact that their concepts of meaning (and even the very idea of what a “question” is) don’t necessarily map onto what humans understand by “meaning.” Remember that dolphins evolved to solve very different problems from humans, and their social relationships are of a different nature than those of our primate ancestors. So both their cognitive and their communicative solutions are different in nature. Denise Herzing is a good example of a researcher who has made great progress understanding dolphin communication on their own terms, rather than imposing human-centric ideas of “question and answer.” I believe that we will eventually understand enough about the way that dolphins transfer and perceive information to make meaningful exchanges possible. But it won’t be “translation,” in the sense that we translate French or Mandarin.
TD: Your editorial seems to suggest that any hypothetical non-human intelligence would have developed the amount of language they need to overcome the challenges of their environment, but no more. If life evolved elsewhere under very different conditions than humans have experienced on Earth, is it a given that we would recognize it and be able to decode it, particularly if they are thousands, if not millions of years in advance of our own development?
AK: This idea of language being balanced between complexity and simplicity is not about how smart we (or aliens) are or how advanced their civilization is. It’s about how the complexity of the language grows with the complexity of the communication. Imagine that you are an alien hunter-gatherer before such a species evolved into a sophisticated technological civilization. As your world becomes more complex, you need a more complex language. Let’s say that after a few tens of thousands of years, your language is now ten times more complex. Does that mean your brain also needs to be ten times more complex? I hope not. Because if you’re suggesting an alien civilization is a million times more sophisticated than us, then their brains might be a million times larger than those of their ancestors! The great thing about language is that it can be complex in its content without being complex in its structure – and this is a property that should be true for complex communication everywhere and anywhere.
Would we be able to recognize it? Possibly, if that structure – complexity with simplicity – is something that we can measure mathematically, and scientists are working to develop such tests and algorithms. Would we be able to decode it? That’s much more contentious. The two main obstacles are, what if an alien’s very concept of meaning is as different to ours as a dolphin’s? The other problem is how do we understand the very nouns of an alien language? You can point to a dog, and a French person will say “chien.” That’s much harder to do when messages take decades or possibly centuries to travel from one planet to another. There’s even one theory that language can only exist as an interactive communication, and a one-way message could never be adequately translated.