If They’re Listening Out There, They’ll Hear From Her

In science fiction, the question of how humans are able to communicate with creatures from different planets is often glossed over or magicked away: The TARDIS translates for the Doctor and his companions; the Babel fish facilitates conversation as Arthur Dent hitchhikes across the galaxy. Yet if aliens ever did make contact with us, how would we make ourselves understood by them, and vice versa? Linguist Sheri Wells-Jensen, who investigates extraterrestrial languages at Bowling Green State University, spoke to PT about the promise and perils of alien communication and how we might prepare the human race, in all its iterations, for a future life in space.

You’ve been pondering space your whole life. Why?
A typical answer is often I went out into the darkness and saw the stars, and I yearned for them. That is kind of my narrative, but the part I resist is that the visual experience of seeing the stars is what creates wonder. Wonder comes from inside. For me, it was just the stillness and a sense that we are small. And the idea that we could go not only outside our homes and communities but our actual planet—what kind of an amazing thing is that? It’s all out there, right there, and there are no limits that we know of.

So why did you pursue linguistics and not astronomy?
Math, astronomy, and physics were always my goal. The reason I didn’t pursue them was 100 percent sociological. I was born blind, and the idea that I would go into the hard sciences—well, nobody really thought that would happen. I wasn’t forbidden, but I was smart enough to read the room when they said, “I guess we could try to Braille that geometry book for you, if you really want us to….” The message was: You’re kind of a pain. I ended up in the Peace Corps, where lost souls often go, and I fell in love with the genius of our language teachers. Their grammatical insights unlocked a whole world of communication.

How can we study alien languages if we’ve never encountered one?
It’s actually not that complicated precisely because we don’t know anything yet. We’re just flailing around, but we’re laying down intellectual depth on the topic. One of the things we study is the variety of languages on Earth; it gives us a jumping-off place for when we do encounter an alien language: Is this like Italian? Like Navajo? Like Hawaiian? We can start with ideas about human languages and then branch out. But we have to be science-fiction writers to some extent and just think about the possibilities. Will the aliens have vision? Will they walk upright? Those traits are useful, but they’re not necessary, and thinking through the possibilities and how they might influence communication can make it so that when we do make first contact, we’re not completely overwhelmed.

What are likely to be the biggest challenges of communicating with aliens?
You and I share a lot of cultural context and speak the same language, but it’s still awfully easy for us to misunderstand one another. If we speak different Earth languages, the likelihood of confusion multiplies. And then, if we’re talking about aliens who may not even share our body shape, let alone any sort of cultural touchstone, the potential for miscommunication is wild.

You’ve been involved in atmospheric test flights—a.k.a. the “vomit comet”—through the organization AstroAccess. What did they reveal?
The purpose of those flights was to figure out disabled peoples’ needs in microgravity. Can deaf people use ASL in zero-G, or do the movements of their hands knock them around the cabin? If you’re blind, how do you stay oriented—how do you know where you are when you no longer have “down” as a reference point? We learned that these are solvable problems. We can use ASL in zero gravity. Disabled people can get into a seat and buckled in in the requisite amount of time. I don’t know that we’re culturally closer, but physically we’re closer than we ever imagined to disabled people participating safely in space flight.

You work with METI International, an organization that periodically sends out messages aliens might intercept—including, in 2017, music and math lessons beamed out to space in binary code. Are there risks to that approach?
We honestly don’t know, and I won’t tell people who are afraid of the danger that their fears are unjustified. But I think it comes down to who we are as a species. What is our inherent nature? Is it to be immobile, to be insular, to hide—or is it to reach out? It’s the same sort of question we ask ourselves every day when we walk into the world. If I see something going on, do I ask, How can I be a part of this? or do I keep my head down and mind my own business? It’s a big philosophical question: How do we want to be in the universe?

What might an effective interstellar message look like?
My hope is on math. We could build from the simplest pieces, ones and zeros—they’re super easy to send on a radio wave, but marvelously powerful. We could send a whole basket of equations and build them up, step by step, inference by inference, until we are saying quite complex things.

Couldn’t aliens be listening to us already?
That’s the reality: We send pulses into space all the dang time, the equivalent of shouting gibberish. Wouldn’t it be better if we sent something intentional? Wouldn’t it be better if we just said “hi”?