Becoming Aliens

ESSAY

Becoming Aliens:
Towards a Universal Language
for Extra-Terrestrial Communication

by Bart Kuipers

For over half a century, scientists have sent messages into the cosmos in an attempt to communicate with intelligent extraterrestrial life forms. In the quest for a universal language that could be understood by unfamiliar life forms of speculative worlds, a multitude of potential communication modes have been developed. While the chances of any message ever reaching an alien civilisation remain limited, it is not entirely inconceivable that one day, one of these highly speculative languages will become the most significant form of expression we have ever had at our disposal. But are we looking in the right place?

The first message ever sent into the cosmos was a series of engraved metal plaques designed by the pioneers of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. In his book Extraterrestrial Languages, Daniel Oberhaus describes how, in 1972, in a spur-of-the-moment decision just months before Pioneer 10 – the first spacecraft with the capacity to leave the Milky Way – was scheduled to launch, NASA gave the two scientists three weeks to come up with a message to plate onto the spacecraft. What they created was a rather elementary drawing featuring the hydrogen atom and basic information designed to locate Earth and establish communication, as well as an image of a nude man and woman. But the search for a universal language predates that first message. In 1960, the Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal proposed Lincos (short for Lingua Cosmica), a language based on formalised logic. Freudenthal assumed that mathematics was the only universal language that any intelligent civilization – regardless of biology, culture, or environment – would be likely to understand. Though universally acknowledged as groundbreaking, Lincos wasn’t used for the first official radio transmission into the cosmos (the 1974 Arecibo message) as it was deemed “a rather risky method for interstellar communication because it assumed that the recipients have brains and logic very similar to ours.”¹

In recent years, new strategies have been proposed by researchers like Nathalie Cabrol, Sarah Stewart Johnson, and Daniel Oberhaus to overcome this Earthly bias. They share the idea that, in the quest to find life in the universe, instead of looking for the convenience of life that is similar to us, we should search for “life as we don’t know it.” By extension, to find a universal language for alien communication, we must take a similar approach.

Nathalie Cabrol, currently the director of the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, proposes in her paper ‘Alien Mindscapes – A Perspective on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’² that “to find ET, we must expand our minds beyond a deeply rooted Earth-centric perspective and reevaluate concepts that are taken for granted. […] Ultimately, to find aliens, we must become the aliens and understand the many ways they could manifest themselves in their environment and communicate their presence.” She argues that extraterrestrial beings are likely to be very different from us, and that their modes of perception and communication might be completely unrecognisable. It is therefore necessary to take a broader approach in the search for a universal language. Cabrol suggests that “a path to finding life we do not know requires us to identify a common universal heritage, one that includes signatures and signals that can be recognised across different evolutionary tracks and across space and time.” She goes on to argue that the natural sciences will probably be part of this shared heritage, as will the constraints they put on life and its evolutionary possibilities that, as she phrases it, might be “the letters of our universal alphabet.”

Efforts to create a universal language built upon natural sciences have already been made. Several methods have been proposed that use biochemical processes and subatomic particle physics to compose messages. In Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, the use of chemiosmosis – a biological process common to all life on Earth – as a basis for message composition is outlined. “The process works by the transfer of electrons through a cell membrane. This electron transfer is used to pump protons from the inside of a membrane to the outside.”³ The authors argue that such a message, in all its simplicity, would demonstrate our evolutionary progress and mastery of biochemistry and particle physics, without requiring complex encoding or decoding. Additionally, Christopher Rose and Gregory Wright propose inscribing matter on an atomic scale as a means of communication. They argue that placing individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate would allow for the encoding of large amounts of data on a compact surface.

However, to expand the search space for a universal alphabet interpretable by a variety of unknown senses, we must venture into the speculative realm of alien perception to make educated guesses about what such an alphabet might look like. In her speculative vision Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway introduces the idea of multi-species sympoiesis (literally, “making together”) as a strategy for surviving the environmental changes facing our damaged planet. She proposes moving beyond the Anthropocene into a new era, the Chthulucene, by fostering multi-species symbiosis across cultures and senses. In the book, Haraway revisits a science fiction story by Ursula Le Guin, The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics (1974). In the story, Therolinguists, researchers working in a fictional field, find messages written by an ant in touch-gland exudation on degerminated acacia seeds. They go on and interpret the messages, confused as to how to translate them correctly. Haraway interprets the touch-gland exudate script written by the ant as biochemical ink and goes on to observe that in Le Guin’s story, “many animals use an active collective kinaesthetic semiotics, as well as chemosensory, visual, and tactile language.”⁴

In another chapter of Staying With the Trouble, ‘The Camille Stories: Children of Compost,’ Haraway imagines five symbiotically modified humans, each named Camille, living with companion species across generations. These Camilles inherit ecological knowledge, tools, and relationships that allow them to adapt to planetary changes such as mass extinction and climate instability. Camille 2, a fifteen-year-old, requests butterfly antennae implants, enabling her to chemically sense her environment and exchange pheromones with the butterflies that are her companions. This sensory adaptation is not just a survival tool. Rather, it gestures toward an expanded communicative capacity that transcends language as we know it. In both these stories, Haraway invites us to think beyond symbolic abstraction or shared logic in the search for a universal language.

If we extrapolate Haraway’s insights into the cosmos, we might find a blueprint for imagining extraterrestrial, multi-species communication across sensory modalities. As Cabrol notes, research has already been undertaken in this direction – for example, in studies of the communication systems of bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales, and squirrel monkeys. Similarly, research into interspecies biochemical communication between humans and dogs, and humans and horses, has demonstrated the capacity to transmit remarkably precise messages through pheromone sensing.

Even with this multitude of proposed strategies for composing messages and the inspiration drawn from other Earthly species, a leap of imagination remains necessary to anchor our efforts in the speculative realm of alien sensing and arrive at a cross-sensory multi-species communication method. Haraway’s thought experiments offer a more integrated view of coexistence and may serve as a useful starting point for expanding how we think about language. Her ideas, and those of other provocative thinkers, can help open up new conceptual spaces in our ongoing search for a truly universal language.

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BART KUIPERS is a hybrid writer and multimedia storyteller from the Netherlands, living in Berlin. He is the unexpected product of master’s degrees in computer science and creative writing and works at the intersection of language and science. He is a Fulbright scholar, and was a participant in the Founding Lab program of IT:U and Ars Electronica. Currently, he is an artist-in-residence at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, where he explores alternative forms of intelligence through the co-authoring of poetry. He has published fiction, non-fiction, and experimental poetry in different magazines in the US and the Netherlands and was a screenwriter for Dutch and German public children’s television shows. Visit Bart’s profile here.

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Edited by JOSH WEEKS
Proofreading by FLORA SAGERS

Lead image by Rick L via Unsplash.