Assortments of Thought

By our own standards at least, communication of a high order remains the hallmark of an intelligent, sentient species. The ability to communicate thoughts, feelings, and abstract ideas sets us apart from all other known animals, and is arguably the basis of sentience itself, for to communicate without, one must first think (“communicate”) within. Yet in spite of its magnificence, should it ever come to meeting with intelligent aliens, communication will likely present a great many barriers to be overcome, beyond even “practical” and environmental ones that may hinder mere attempts at it. For different species may communicate through varying physical means, for instance, or else be physiologically incapable of producing or of even perceiving others’ languages. Further, just as two equally-functional computer processors typically can’t understand the other’s “languages”, so too might alien minds be incapable of comprehending languages that developed independently of them. While the use of multiple sign languages though–each species perceiving all others, while producing just their own–could likely be a workaround for the physical and physiological barriers (in fact, given certain characteristics of light versus sound, spoken languages could probably work in this way as well), no such simple workaround exists for the potential comprehension barrier. Indeed, only the rather extreme and questionable approach of creating a new species could seemingly handle it, for “universal translators” could only be built once someone had comprehension of the languages to be interpreted between. Hence inter-species communication may be far trickier than science fiction at least nearly always suggests, and with it, so too may be any true form of a cosmic community; serving as a reminder, perhaps, of the very special bond that we–like all members of any given species–truly share.

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