How to Communicate with ET? Melih S¨ ozdinler1 Computer Engineering Bogazi¸ci University Bebek,Istanbul 34342 Turkey
Abstract. As a human being, we are always trying to be curious about the life outside the world. It is obviously, even more challenging than finding different creatures living in our world. People tend to always concerate what happens when we encounter other species called ET(abbreviation becomes famous with Spielberg’s film in 1982 means Extra-Terrestial), but if there exist any ET outside of our world or maybe our galaxy, and let’s say eventually we find them, what will happen? How can we comunicate? Will we fight? These questions come in our mind and maybe more challenging one is ”how we communicate with ET species?
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Introduction
Upto now, we are able to extend our dreams with the figures that are used to represent the ET species in movies and comics. These figures are representing many icons that are both evil and good. That makes the ET to be more enigmatic. Actually, we don’t know anything about ET. ”Are they good or evil?” ”What would they do at the possible encounter?” ”How can we communicate?” These are all open questions maybe never answered in the future until we encounter a real ET. Also, We will still have some contradictions and open problems. For example, ”How can we have language acquisition?”. During last 30 years, the idea of ”Universal Grammer” over the ”Chomsky Hierarchy” has been accepted to be true both mathematically and mentally. If we consider ETs, what will happen? First of all, in essence, we should solve that Universal Grammer is relavent for all human beings in the world and in essence it is relatively related with understanding the cognitive funtions of our brain. In the case of ET, from now on, consider the case that we understand our brain functions and language acquisition. Indeed, ETs probably have a universal grammer too. If we say that problem is taking the new born children from ET parents and make them to grow with human being parents. Then, if newborn ETs could able to talk human languages, we can communicate with them easily since ET childs can also learn ET language easily. Vice versa, it is relevant when the human children can able to learn one of the ET languages. However, the problem may not be solved easily as it is solved. From their technology and our technology, we would have
the idea about the intelligence of each species. Using intelligent once, we can just try to play naming game with them and try to make them to setup object-sound relations. In order to do that, we shoud select language that is the easiest one to be learned. Hopefully, we can wait them to understand these concepts. The problem in this convention is about the objects. We have integer numbers from 1 to inf. We have these numbers to associate the world outside with the concepts our brains. But what if our intelligence and knowledge evolution drives us to use numbers? ETs could have different concepts because of different evolution. For instance, instead of numbers, they might be using different concepts. So teaching these object sound relations may not be successful since ETs may have different intelligence and knowledge evolution. Also, if they are too primitive, we may try to communicate just trying to communicate with barbaric people and vice versa. Furthermore, we have different emotions such as being angry, happy, sad etc. On the other hand, ETs may not have emotions as we have( In Spielberg’s movie ET is crying). Even in the case when we do not like them, and try to kill the encountered ones, they may respond quite cool just doing nothing. Emotional differences make the problem much more harder. They may not reflect emotions and we will feel just as the same as when we speak with robots if we can.
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Conclusion
Upto now, we thought that ETs should talk, react, learn, think when we encounter with them since we are all effected by the science fiction movies. Our vision is narrow, before a possible encounter, predicting the ”what will happen” style questions would be many but answering them correctly is not possible. We will also do not have any idea about how we can communicate with them. For now, we can just produce case based scenarios just we mention during the introduction part. We should integrate these possible scenarios in order to use at first encounter.