How to Contact Aliens

Cirrus

Member
Messages
485
An alien would likely share little or nothing in common with us. There is no common ground around which languages can be translated to one another. You might be able to communicate plain facts, like Earth is the third planet, but nothing abstract or meaningful.

Unless a group of humanoid aliens monitoring Earth crash landed about 2 million years ago with no hope for rebuilding their ship. After the survivors discovered that they could breathe the air, they decided to bang some homo erectus for fun (and because they could not shake the attraction of their musk). Strangely enough, these humanoid aliens were able to interbreed with homo erectus thus leading to the evolution of homo sapiens. The humanoid aliens taught the homo erectus their language and passed on pieces of their knowledge.

Just playing devil's advocate here. I agree with your assumptions generally, but, there's could always be a different answer. But we won't know for sure until we know. We may never know.

I simply am not so naive to think I can buy a CB radio and talk about baseball with aliens.

Unless Babe Ruth was an alien....
 

Kairos

Senior Member
Messages
1,103
Unless a group of humanoid aliens monitoring Earth crash landed about 2 million years ago with no hope for rebuilding their ship. After the survivors discovered that they could breathe the air, they decided to bang some homo erectus for fun (and because they could not shake the attraction of their musk). Strangely enough, these humanoid aliens were able to interbreed with homo erectus thus leading to the evolution of homo sapiens. The humanoid aliens taught the homo erectus their language and passed on pieces of their knowledge.

Just playing devil's advocate here. I agree with your assumptions generally, but, there's could always be a different answer. But we won't know for sure until we know. We may never know.



Unless Babe Ruth was an alien....


If biological aliens ever stepped foot on planet Earth our biosphere would be contaminated with their biosphere. The evidence would be manifest. I do not believe biological aliens ever once stepped foot on this planet.

Maybe machines. Maybe there is another species from the Earth that went out to space and comes back. I doubt the latter as well, since there is no evidence of any earlier civilization whatsoever.

People watch too much shitty space fantasy television. We are not going to have aliens come here and walk around, fucking up our biosphere with their version of cellular life shedding off everywhere. Any humans that ever came into contact with such creatures would have to be forever banned from coming anywhere near Earth, or anything or anybody that will come here.

Any slightly more advanced civilization from our own would just build robots or biots (using Earth-based life) to interface with us. You cannot just walk up and contaminate an entire planet.
 

Kairos

Senior Member
Messages
1,103
Why not? Isn't that the plan for Mars?

There is no biosphere on Mars. If there were, we very well wouldn't want to contaminate it. If there were another civilization living there, we definitely would not want to go there and ruin it, or vice versa. If we ever colonize it, and then find out there is biological material there, the people who live there would have to be quarantined from the rest of humanity.

NASA pays people money to protect biospheres. I think they call it Planetary Protection Protocol or something along those lines.

No alien biological material should ever be released into the wild of Earth. Bad shit can happen.
 

Element115

Member
Messages
165
Language is man-made and we've had hundreds of thousands of languages across time on this planet. Language evolves as we evolve. In the future our language will be English dominant but it will include words from other languages mixed in as new English words/phrases.
 

Kairos

Senior Member
Messages
1,103
Language is man-made and we've had hundreds of thousands of languages across time on this planet. Language evolves as we evolve. In the future our language will be English dominant but it will include words from other languages mixed in as new English words/phrases.


They are all the same language, though. Just different dialects. We can even trace them all back to one ancestral human language our ancestors spoke when they left Africa.

Check out some of the work by Pinker and Chomsky. Horrible leftists, but science on the evolutionary basis of language is good. I think the context-free grammar approach is not as accurate as a frame-based approach, personally, but their evolutionary work is pretty solid.

 

Element115

Member
Messages
165
They are all the same language, though. Just different dialects. We can even trace them all back to one ancestral human language our ancestors spoke when they left Africa.
We can trace it back to hieroglyphs and grunt noises. It's easy to establish a language. Pick up an object. Make a sound repeatedly and now that sound is associated with this object. Boom. Invented the first word.
 

Kairos

Senior Member
Messages
1,103
We can trace it back to hieroglyphs and grunt noises. It's easy to establish a language. Pick up an object. Make a sound repeatedly and now that sound is associated with this object. Boom. Invented the first word.

It's not that simple. You just don't understand linguistics very well and probably have very little background on cognitive science and human evolution. I am not trying to be mean here. I just think you should pause and try to understand what I am telling you. I drop names you can look up yourself.
 

Element115

Member
Messages
165
It's not that simple. You just don't understand linguistics very well and probably have very little background on cognitive science and human evolution. I am not trying to be mean here. I just think you should pause and try to understand what I am telling you. I drop names you can look up yourself.
Is anything "that simple"? I'm just talking in a nut shell here. Just our English language today as an example, if you trace it back to Old English, you wouldn't understand a damn thing. Both are English - but radically different due to our evolution. In fact, our technological revolution has been the basis of many new words to describe our new technologies.
 

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