Tongue-Tied: The Inadequacy of Language for Interstellar Communication Our goal is to construct a message that another intelligence, completely unfamiliar with humankind, would be able to understand. It is assumed that the recipient is so far away that interaction in any reasonable time frame would be unfeasible, so the message must be entirely self-contained. Furthermore, since we know nothing about our target audience, we would like to keep our assumptions about their scientific knowledge, physiology, cognitive processes, and so on, to a minimum. If they have to be very human-like in order to understand the message, we have failed at our task. All we should demand of our audience is that they have the technical wherewithal to build equipment capable of receiving our message. Even if the recipients were human, we could not necessarily expect them to be able to decode an arbitrary piece of English text. Historically, human archaeologists have had great difficulty decoding natural language texts written by other humans. In every case analogous to the interstellar decoding problem, to decipher the text they have relied on intermediary encodings (such as the Rosetta Stone, or modern versions of ancient languages) and a familiarity with human nature (e.g., that writings on a tomb are likely to be about the entombed person’s life). So, the message we send should not be arbitrary. Rather, it should be designed to be understood by an intelligent recipient with minimal knowledge of the sender. It has been argued that a large corpus of the written form of a natural language (English, French, or Chinese, for example) would serve this purpose. The main advantage to this approach is that there are large bodies of existing text that could serve as the bulk of the message. The question is, would it be understood? We believe that a natural-language text message, no matter how large and carefully composed it is, is extremely unlikely to be decodable by a non-human intelligence.

• published: 11 Nov 2014
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