Alien language: If we met extraterrestrials, could we talk to them?

Alien lifeforms are likely to have evolved their own unique ways of communicating, so how might humanity communicate with them if ever make ?

"We know where to look. We know how to look." That's what then Nasa's chief scientist Ellen Stofan said in 2015 when she predicted we might find alien life within the following 10 years. Today, only two years from the end of that date range, researchers believe they may be tantalisingly close to finding evidence that extraterrestrial life might well exist on far off planets. But while there is no definitive proof as yet, some scientists believe it is something we should be preparing for.

So, what if we do discover life on another planet? And if it turns out to be intelligent, how might we communicate with our cosmic neighbours? Scientists are already beginning to ask what alien language might be like and if our species could ever hope to understand each other.

Humans have a long history of bridging seemingly impossible language barriers. Researchers who decipher ancient scripts and languages use shared human habits as a reference point. For example, the way we might circle something important in writing helped scholars unlock the Rosetta Stone, a decree that dates to 196BC that provided a clue to reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Body language is also an important tool – when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, for example, they used hand signs and gestures to communicate with the indigenous people they met. The tragic, bloody outcome of those encounters, perhaps shouldn't serve as an example of how this can be done successfully.

Humans, however, are a species that has evolved to communicate with one another. Extraterrestrial beings may think and behave in a completely different way to us. Their social structure – if they have one – could be totally unrecognisable or even unfathomable. So, how could we guess what they might be trying to say? 

If you were to listen to Earth from outer space, you'd hear around 7,100 human languages. But our planet is inhabited by creatures other than just humans. Could the ways animals communicate with one another teach us anything about extraterrestrial communication?

Arik Kershenbaum, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, believes evolutionary challenges are truly universal, and that the evolutionary forces that shape life on Earth will produce many similar features in extraterrestrial life. If he's correct, it would mean life – and language – throughout the cosmos may share certain features.

Life achieves complexity, over many millennia, by retaining favourable changes and losing unfavourable ones – otherwise known as natural selection. In evolutionary convergence, unrelated lineages of organisms evolve similar features in response to similar environmental challenges.

Take travel – the laws of physics and biomechanics constrain the number of different ways it is possible for animals to move about. This is why the wings of birds work in very much the same way as the wings of bats, even though their last common ancestor was a small wingless lizard-like creature that lived over 300 million years ago.

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Why would such constraints be different anywhere in the universe? Everything everywhere – communication included – is subject to the laws of physics (as far as we know). From the gestures of apes and the whistles of dolphins, to the swirling patterns of colours on the skin of a cuttlefish, any one of these, argues Kershenbaum, could be the basis of language on an alien planet.

Animal communication can only tell us so much though, according to Ian Roberts, a professor of linguistics who is also at the University of Cambridge. "We are the only species that have language in the sense of an open-ended system which can be used to express anything you want to express," he says.

Roberts recently co-authored a book, Xenolinguistics – alongside Kershenbaum, Avram Noam Chomsky and other leading biologists, anthropologists and linguists – to explore what non-human, non-Earthbound language might look like.

A theoretical linguist, Chomsky defined language as a system of communication that is infinitely adaptable, designed to serve human interests and to solve human problems – one that's flexible enough to communicate a very large number of concepts.

"It may well be that there's some kind of bacterial life on Mars or on the moons of Jupiter – but these would be very simple organisms," says Roberts. "What I'm interested in is the nature of intelligent organisms. So, you have to decide, what's the criterion for intelligence">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });