Question: How would you communicate with an alien?

[DetlefK]

You are standing in front of an sentient alien, who can hear your voice and see what you see. You can touch each other safely. You have the necessary materials to draw pictures. It does not understand ANY human language or code and is so strange in bodily terms that it does not understand ANY human gestures.

We all have heard, how mathematics is supposed to be a pure form of communication. (Remember the helicopter with the floodlights in "Independence Day"?)
Consider this: Can you create the following message by using mathematical constructs and their algebra?

"I am Bob.
I am a human.
I am from earth.
I come in peace."

Or is this message already too complex and has to be communicated by pictographic images? But these images always contain visual fragments from the environmental and cultural context of the drawer. So what should such a universal pictographic image look like?

What if we use chemical components as a starter? We could show the chemical profiles of our sun, planet earth and a human body, for example by using absorption spectra. Then we use those profiles as substitutes for the words "sun", "earth" and "human".
-> Then we could draw connections from those profiles/words to pictographic images or a logographic alphabet.



How would you communicate with an alien?

[Turbineguy]

1. I suppose I would

have to practice with teabaggers first.

[IADEMO2004]

2. Great reply.

[zbdent]

10. you would have more luck with the aliens ...

although, now that I think about it ...

by the way that the aliens seem to have this thing about anal probes, they might be able to reach the ears of the baggers that way ...

[liberal N proud]

3. In Spanish

:sarcasm:

[kentauros]

13. No, use Esperanto.

:P

[geckosfeet]

4. You offer them cannoli - preferably with chocolate chip filling. Not sure about the name parts

but I am sure that they would be more interested in bio-function than social convention.

[Buzz Clik]

5. You talk slowly and REALLY LOUD!

"WHERE! DO! YOU! COME! FROM?" (while pointing at the sky)

[AlecBGreen]

7. +1

:rofl:

[Angry Dragon]

6. Music and math

[Buzz Clik]

8. Good idea. This is how I'd start: give him my math homework and a pencil.

So, if b=2 and a=3 and c is 7, what's x?

Next up: geometry:

[hunter]

18. Then they look at you like an annoyed cat encountering a noisy puppy.

Maybe they write something like this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram

And then we call upon our greatest theoretical physicists to respond, whereupon the aliens draw a big "X" across the Feynman diagram, followed by a full page of incomprehensible squiggles.

You see, in the space alien's hives their larvae are hatched with an innate comprehension of quantum physics and faster-than-light teleportation, and frankly they didn't come to Earth to communicate with us. They are here to study beetles.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetles

[RevStPatrick]

9. Hugs

Everybody understands hugs.
Even those damned uptight Alpha Centaurians.

[Sancho]

11. In Florida, we'd do one of two things...

shoot 'em with our legally owned gun: there's no law specifically prohibiting shooting of undocumented aliens

or

sell 'em some swamp land complete with house (chinese wallboard), insurance that doesn't cover sinkholes or hurricanes, a mortgage at 22% apr, and then repossess the house for a new mall and football stadium. Then we'd provide them a voter registration card that says who they just voted for...we're real good at communicating in Florida.

[MineralMan]

12. Well, some would communicate by shooting them.

There is a lot of sentiment in that direction.

[Igel]

14. Once had an intro to cross-cultural communication.

I was going to be tutoring "boat people." Largely illiterate, from poor rural areas.

So a speaker of some language went up in front of the classroom with a few objects. Simple, right? Point and say the word. So she pointed and said a word. She had us repeat it. Then she taught us a couple more words.

We were asked what the words meant. Were they the name of the object, their colors, materials, how she was holding them, their size or some other attribute (big, smalll, old, new, important, cheap...), their uses?

Point taken.

Years later I saw one of Kenneth Pike's "monolingual demonstrations." He was a linguist, and a damned good field researcher. The linguistics dept. had brought in a black woman who was pretending to not speak English. Pike had 60 or 90 minutes to prise out as many words and as much grammar as was possible. He had no idea what language she spoke.

He started everywhere: He'd hold up an object and transcribe what she said. He'd manipulate the object and transcribe. He'd alter the object and transcribe. He'd carefully selected his objects: Some were almost the same, with just a few things different--size, color, material. In 30 minutes he had a fairly good idea of the phonemic inventory, had worked out a few grammatical morphemes, and had several meanings proposed for a number of words. He then proceeded to eliminate possible meanings while teasing out more words. Her skin color and the language she spoke confused him. She was obviously African in ancestry; the language was utterly un-African. He worked out a few dozen words, had a few dozen more with suggested meanings, a reasonable sized chunk of the grammar, and his phonemic inventory wasn't half bad in the time he had. Never did guess the language: Garifuna. The woman went through and "graded" his work--he got one word wrong, but otherwise was good for his "I'm pretty sure about these" words.

Pike's approach is how you'd have to do it. Start with concrete objects carefully chosen and see what they say. Form hypotheses and test them. As you go, sort out what attributes are being taken as most salient; as you discover those, you learn things about the culture (and in the case of aliens, about their sensory apparatus and what they think is most perceptually salient). Keep it simple, work out the grammar and what's important before you try to build a hefty lexicon.

Math is a good basis for some communication. Mostly it's there to demonstrate sentience and level of intellectual sophistication. Any race that's made it to space will have worked out a lot of math; mathematical relations are presumably either universal or universally decipherable, once you've worked out the symbols. Won't help with, "Hi, I'm Bob, are those large lumps on your chest really breasts?" or "You really should have warned me that the empanada was full of boiled grub paste, I only like roasted grubs."

[Festivito]

15. I wouldn't start with self-references.

But, what, he doesn't react to arm waving?

First, what does make him react?
Then, find commonality.

Math is a fine discipline. But, first you'd have to establish that you both know what equality is. With that in common, progress to 1+1.

[dimbear]

16. Show each other your orreries. That immediately tells where you're coming from.

Alternative approach: 50's sci fi.

[YankeyMCC]

17. Cartoon