While the word alien is seemingly self-explanatory, this is by no means the case. The online Oxford English Dictionary defines the word, in the sense that refers to non-humans, as: “an (intelligent) being from another planet.” Whether the extraterrestrial being must be intelligent or not seems to be a matter of preference. If we grant that it is intelligent, we could debate what counts as intelligence: Are we talking about human intelligence? Animal intelligence? IQ? It is even more unclear what counts as being: does being imply life? Does it imply consciousness? Could a robot from outer space be considered an alien? The ambiguity of the definition is of course expected because we use the word to refer to something that we don’t even know.
In this blog, when I refer to aliens I refer to anything extraterrestrial that is capable of signed communication.1 Whether these aliens are alive or not is not my concern as long as they can communicate.2 I think it is important to highlight the extraterrestrial quality to avoid constraining ourselves to the communication forms we can find on earth. Don’t get me wrong, the Earth is full of fascinating creatures which are more alien to us than our own depictions of aliens and which offer amazing examples of non-human communication systems. Other forms of life on Earth might be our best bet to think outside of our human box and inspire representations of aliens; in fact, that is what I do in this project. However, if we believe that all the fascinating possibilities that our home planet has to offer are all there is to explore in the universe, we would be closing the doors to imagining other intriguing communication systems in the vastness of the universe. Furthermore, the challenge of studying alien communication systems—which involves imagining what those systems are even like—may help us study those whose existence we already know and deepen our understanding of the nature of communication.
Since I have constrained my aliens to have a form of signed communication I should clarify what I mean by signed and by communication. By communication, I mean the transmission of information between interlocutors (producer and receptor), whether it is alien-to-alien, alien-to-human, or human-to-alien. This understanding of communication excludes any information that is sent and received by the same entity3 as well as information that is produced but it is not received (which could be a failed communication attempt).
By signed, I mean that the information transmitted cannot be the same as the medium of transmission.4 In other words, the medium serves as a sign or sign carrier because it stands for something it is not. This is a crucial distinction: in our world we could argue that every physical object we can see is communicating with us because it is producing visual information (i.e., its colors and shapes) and this information is being transmitted to our eyes via light waves. However, this type of information is no other than the medium itself: the reflected light coming from the object. While I think it is possible to conceive of a communication system where the medium is the message (i.e., an unsigned communication system) I will focus on signed communication for now.5
I prefer the term alien communication system (ACS) over alien language to refer to any form of signed communication created by aliens. ACS encompasses all kinds of systems that allow the transmission of information across interlocutors no matter the complexity, structure, or function of the information. I reserve the term alien language to encompass a subset of ACSs that match our expectations of what qualifies as a language. What those expectations are exactly, I am not entirely sure. Linguists can agree—I hope— that any structured communication system with grammar and lexicon, acquired from birth, and spoken by a human community is a natural language… as agreement goes it pretty much stops there. Some guidelines have been proposed to distinguish human languages from animal languages—which I would prefer calling animal communication systems to avoid projecting our language expectations—such as Hocket’s design features. However, there is no formal consensus as to what are the minimal requirements for a language to be unnatural (i.e., non-human) and still qualify as a language; the word language has so many senses that for some people it is a synonym of communication while for others, like me, it refers to a specific type of communication (even if we disagree on how we define that specific). I may come back to the issue of what counts as a language later on since I have lots of thoughts on it and it is related to the main theme of this project; however, I will focus on ACSs.
- This is not a definition but rather a constraint to the kind of aliens that are the subject of this project. ↩︎
- Debating what counts as life in the context of aliens is problematic because all our understanding of life is grounded in Earth. Besides, let’s assume a super advanced alien species that has designed technology capable of communication… we surely would be interested in communicating with these alien robots. ↩︎
- Unless the producer and receptor are two different entities within the same body. ↩︎
- I am effectively implying that communication requires a medium. This assumption can be challenged if we believe that the transmission of information can be literally instantaneous as in some form of telepathy. While the scenario is interesting (and an easy ‘way out’ for sci-fi authors who don’t want to deal with all the struggles of having a medium) I will stay away from it for now. ↩︎
- It is also worth noticing that requiring the aliens in this blog to be capable of signed communication does not exclude them from being capable of unsigned communication nor am I saying that aliens with solely unsigned ACSs should not be explored. ↩︎