How We'll Talk To Aliens
Emily Gertz
at 11:25 AM May 28 2014
How We'll Talk To Aliens
Interaction on a Galactic Scale
Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Merritt (Rochester Institute of Technology), M. Milosavljevic (Caltech), M. Favata (Cornell), S.A. Hughes (MIT), and D.E. Holz (Univ. of Chicago)

Assuming we one day contact aliens, how will we communicate with them? That's the subject of a new book from NASA called Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication(Kudos to Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo for uncovering it.) The book steps outside astrophysics and computer science to explore how archeologists and anthropologists have approached cross-cultural communications between human cultures, and what those techniques and analytical frames could contribute to understanding a message from an alien culture.

“It's a serious book—deep and complex, but quite accessible," Diaz writes about the new title, Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication, “...that takes into consideration our knowledge on historical and prehistorical Earth, as well as our understanding of biology, evolution, and physics."

If it did nothing else, space exploration enthusiasts would find the book a good read for its concise histories, institutional and political, of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. But the book is also refreshing because the contributors step beyond the usual technological questions, defensive worries, or assumptions about supposed fundamentals of human-alien communication.

"Indeed, much of the literature on contact with extraterrestrial intelligence tacitly assumes that an alien civilization will be culturally unified, unlike our own world," writes John Traphagen in his chapter on "Culture and Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence," which explores definitions of culture, and the limits of "common languages" like mathematics or higher technologies in creating cross-cultural understanding.

However, if we do look at our own world as an analogue of what we might find elsewhere, we must face the fact that we could be dealing with a world fragmented into different cultural frameworks, much as our own is, and consisting of beings who may not respond to contact with us in a uniform way. Technological advancement on Earth has not always been associated with increased political and social integration (think World Wars I and II). Even if the experience of our planet is dissimilar to that of another world, it seems reasonable to think that we will be dealing with beings shaped by common memories (among themselves) and who will share, but who will also debate and contest, ideas developed within the frameworks of those common memories and experiences about what to do with the fact of having contacted humans.

Add to this "the strong likelihood that alien beings may have sensory organs that are quite different from our own and, thus, may process experience and translate that experience into cultural frameworks in a way different from our own," Traphagen writes. He proposes that in addition to deciphering the meaning of a theoretical future contact from the stars, we will also have to consider its context: what the method of communication and means of conveying information tell us about who sends it.

Reading this chapter put me in mind of Mary Doria Russell's first-contact novel The Sparrow, in which the beauty of an alien civiliation's music blinds the protagonist to how completely (and disastrously) he has misunderstood their culture.

Diaz's enthusiastic recommendation of this book must have perceptibly spiked the number of visitors to NASA's website, because the next thing he knew, NASA chief historian Bill Barry contacted him to say the agency had pulled the e-book offline pending the arrival of printed copies in June. But NASA apparently reconsidered benefits of the viral buzz being generated, and as Diaz writes, has put the book back online in multiple e-formats.

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