One way to look at this is to consider why the aliens came in the first place. There’s some common sci-fi tropes around this, but most of them fall apart under scrutiny. Now, this scrutiny does assume that our understanding of the physical laws of the universe are “close enough” that we can rule out such magic as stargates, warp drives or the like. Yes, there are some theories like the Alcubierre drive, but those sit far enough at the edge of “might be possible” that I’m going to ignore them.
Give us your resources (water, gold, hair)
On the scale of “everything in our solar system”, the Earth contains a vanishingly small amount of everything which isn’t biological. Water, minerals, and other inorganic stuff is in vast abundance in comets and asteroids. And this ignores the possibilities of rocky bodies much, much, much closer to home for any alien species. The distances in interstellar space are absolutely vast. Just getting to the next star over is going to require an insane investment of time, material and energy. And then you want to stop, turn around and go back? XKCD did a What If a while back which contemplated catching up to the Voyager probe and bringing it back. It’s technically possible. It would also require something like 10-15 Saturn V rocket’s worth of fuel. Now multiply that by a stupidly large number for going to another solar system. The energy expenditure to go pick up rocks in another solar system is just never going to be worth it.
And then there is the issue of time. Thanks to the wonders of length contraction, a vehicle could accelerate at 1G half way to the target solar system, flip around and decelerate at 1g to be able to stop there. And the time for the travelers would actually be pretty reasonable. You could cross the disk of the galaxy in about 24 years (assuming you want to stop on the other side) [source]. Of course, that’s 24 years for the travelers. Back home a couple hundred thousand years will have passed. And you thought your dad has taken a long time to get cigarettes at the corner store.
Even just going to Alpha Centari , the traveler experiences 3.9 years. Back home, it’s 6. This means there’s a round trip time of 12 years, and that’s just for the closest possible star. It gets far longer really quick. It’s likely that hundreds or thousands of years will pass “back home” while the travelers are going somewhere. By the time they get back, their home may so radically different that the stuff they set out to get isn’t even in demand anymore. Here is a fun calculator you can play with the numbers yourself.
The last thing to mention is the fun of Reaction Mass. Again, unless we find some spooky new source of thrust, going forward means throwing stuff backwards. And when you’re talking about accelerating at 1g for years, that is an insane amount of “stuff” you need to huck out the back of your spaceship to keep that level of acceleration up. Once again, the scale of the universe results in insane requirements.
With all that said, strip mining nearby solar systems seems really unlikely. Perhaps more likely will be the next trope.
Hi, that’s a nice planet you have there. It’d be a shame if someone colonized it.
So, this has all the “fun” of energy costs and reaction mass as above, but at least you don’t have to worry about going back. And given the vast distances involved, this is a one way trip and communicating to the home world won’t need to happen. It’s going to be a case of launching a seed into the darkness and not expecting to hear from them again. Maybe provisions will be made to send back a “we did it” beacon. This will prevent reseeding the same planet over again. But, at a message latency of years (possibly centuries), keeping up a dialog is going to be pointless. Even a returning “we did it” probe could arrive back to a society which asks, “who the fuck are these guys?” Because all records of the trip got lost three centuries ago.
This is also something which is going to require a lot of faith on the part of the colonists. At best, the knowledge they have of the planet they are going to is years, decades or centuries out of date. Imagine getting part of the way there, only to realize that the planet you hoped to colonize got cooked by a large solar flare. You’re now committed to a journey which will end with trying to desperately setup some sort of long term habitat somewhere really inhospitable. I hope you’re good at creating O’Neill Cylinders. In fact, why didn’t you just make one of those in the first place and save all the energy and effort of flinging yourself at a distant star on a wing and a prayer? Unless your home star is about to die, leaving it doesn’t make much sense. Large rotating habitats are likely to be a far easier engineering challenge than building an interstellar ship. And they will be close enough to home that, if something goes wrong, help might actually reach them in time.
Our five thousand year mission is to seek out new life and explore strange new worlds
Ok, standard caveats here about energy costs and reaction mass. However, humans have done some pretty amazing things just for curiosity, aliens doing the same seems reasonable. Though this leaves the issue of time. Now, I’d expect that any such long range mission would be done with automated drones collecting data. Maybe with intelligent enough AI to recognize intelligent life, collect data and then start the long journey home. And maybe when it arrives home, it won’t get blasted out of the sky as some unrecognizable alien device, because the program which launched it got shut down due to lack of funding 50 years ago. But, the time from launch to probe return starts to get kinda crazy really fast. Imagine you launch a probe and, if everything goes exactly right, it doesn’t return for a thousand years. Maybe at some technological level this seems reasonable, but societies just don’t seem to be stable that long.
So ya, maybe this would be a reason for automated drones recording anything and everything they can. But sending people to do this means those people leaving home and expecting to return to a world so vastly different from the one they left as to be unrecognizable. Unless they somehow have a society that just doesn’t drift at all, it’s quite possible that they will arrive home and have to figure out the language their own people are speaking. I don’t doubt we would find people willing to take this on (heck, I might have gone for it when I was younger). At the same time, the investment of energy and resources will need to be borne by a society which has zero expectation of ever seeing anything back for that investment. Again, it’s possible, but also seems pretty far fetched.
The great invisible sky wizard of Frobozz demands we cleanse the universe of the unclean (this means you).
Another thing, which has motivated humans to amazing heights of effort, wastefulness and stupidity is belief. Nothing gets large groups of people motivated to piss away resources like a religion. Why would it be any different for aliens? So maybe, there is some species out there which is majority held under a strong enough belief system that they are actually willing to expend the time, energy and resources to obliterate any signs of alien life. And Earth just fucked up by having an oxygen rich atmosphere. As a possible sign of life, this means all Earthlings must die. So, how are we destroying the Earth? Well, we could go there, look for signs of life, report back, setup an invasion fleet, etc, etc. Or, remember that whole “slowing down” part of visiting another solar system? What if we skip that and instead just send several large chunks of iron and have them keep accelerating the whole way? They can then use advanced Lithobraking to turn said planet to a far flung cloud of debris. This takes less time and avoids issues with plucky pilots flying up the exhaust port of our invasion mothership.
Welcome to the Dark Forest. Population: Whatever it was, less all humans. If the goal is total annihilation, the same tech which would get a ship to another solar system is exactly the same tech needed to simply destroy a planet in that solar system. At the energies involved in a sizable object moving that fast, it’s going to exceed the binding energy of a planet. Fling a few such devices at a remote solar system, provide a bit of automated terminal guidance and program them to dust any planetary body which shows signs of life. Set a timer for a few years/decades from now to turn your telescopes that direction and wait for the show.
In this case, they won’t care what our language is and we won’t even know we’ve been “visited” by aliens, as we will have all died in massive flash of energy. Good times all around.
Conclusion
Unless there is a way around the speed of light limit to the universe, visiting other solar systems is probably off the table. Sure, there may be some very long range program to send automated drones to the nearest stars and collect some data/pictures for return to a later version of our society. But at the energies and timescales involved, it’s unlikely. And for further away solar systems, the timescales make it so impractical that it’s probably never going to happen. This also means that aliens visiting Earth and having to sort out our language, is also likely never going to happen. Getting out here just really isn’t practical.
You ignored the question
Arrival has an excellent exploration of this.
The most sci-fi part of the movie was how all the governments on Earth had their best experts working on communicating and sharing information. The most realistic part was how they stopped sharing data and some religious nationalist dipshit tried to kill everyone.
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My wife and kids watched it the other day. I thought it might be too slow for them but they loved it.
For those who haven’t, please consider reading the short story on which it is based by Ted Chiang.
Villeneuve made a number of changes, but there is one in particular that may (or may not) reframe your perception of a character in a notable way. Also, read everything else by Ted Chiang!
There are also a number of popular media articles on how the language piece was developed for depiction on screen.
So good
Good flick.
I don’t think it really matters.
I think the aliens will either be for war or peace. The aliens that are in the middle will avoid contact with other worlds. The ones that are for war might try and seem like they are for peace but communication won’t really matter. The ones that are for peace will be experienced some at least and give us a wide birth.
I guess if we are the aliens first first contact then we would be on equal footing.
Fun to speculate.
I’m thinking if they could get here then they’re obviously far more advanced than us, beyond our understanding since we don’t have the ability to space travel.
Would they be so advanced that we’re just like mice to them or something? We are far more advanced than mice, but we can’t directly communicate with them, only indirectly like giving them rewards of food to train them is a form of communication. But then, nothing else has the ability of language other than us, which is big thing separating us from animals.
Maybe aliens would find learning and using our language so easy and rudimentary that it would be as simple as us giving food to a mouse as a reward. Maybe aliens communicate telepathically and find language to be extremely slow and tedious. Who knows.
or like the scrin, in cnc3, they analyze our language using thier tech, and learn it in a matter of 30seconds.
I want to spank your sister with a slice of baloney.
Everyone here assuming the aliens would be far more advanced than us.
Spoiler for the novel Footfall
Aliens that look like baby elephants roll up and throw rocks from orbit until we, quickly, give in.
They’re not much, if any, more advanced than us. They riding in a generation ship and using tech from an advanced race that died off, don’t know how to work half of it.
“The Road Not Taken” by Harry Turtledove. Short story.
The aliens have space ships and that’s it. They still use horses, bows and arrows, and spears.
Turns out, space travel is easy and we’ve been doing things the hard way…
Going to read that!
There are core concepts that are likely to be universally understood.
Maths is probably the best and most common example. If we imagine the symbols have been removed and we work under the assumption that we’re manipulating objects we can show that 1 object + 1 object = 2 objects without any language necessary. From there we (aliens and humans) can work together to build a common foundation of understanding.
Don’t get me wrong, this will not be easy and there will be problems we haven’t thought of but there’s a good chance that a spacefaring civilisation will know enough about mathematics to build a new common language.
Stargate has an episode on this where they use the table of elements as a universal language.
What’s interesting there is that our understanding of elements is almost entirely theoretical. The math works out, but we might be missing entire particle structures or interactions. We observe atomic forces and give them names, but it’s all built on particle theories that started as one lump and have been honed over time.
Aliens might have a periodic table of dimensional harmonic wave frequencies. Our concept of elements to aliens might be like when we meet an uncontacted culture which does not have numbers larger than 4.
Some parts of the theory have been demonstrated. For instance:
This is a scanning electron microscope image of a crystal structure (PrScO3). The bright spots are atomic nuclei.
The full paper is here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg2533
To interact with us in any meaningful way I think we have to assume that the aliens exist in our universe composed of atoms. Regardless of how they perceive the atomic structure, the structure would be the same.
Sure, but even that is based on perceiving electromagnetic waves visually. The electron microscope represents the smallest particle that we can bounce off of another particle. That’s why we can’t visualize things on a smaller scale. Then we have the Planck length which is the theoretical limit of what we can predict physics are like at tiny scales.
But imagine a life form that evolved to perceive gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves (light). Or maybe there’s some other force that we aren’t even aware of.
So much of our understanding of the universe is a reflection of some Precambrian paramecium mutating an eyespot or cilia that can detect sound waves.
This is exactly why scientists designed the Arecibo message with mathematical patterns and prime numbers as the foundation - math trancends langauge barriers and would likely be the first bridge to communication with any advanced species.
one of the sg1 episodes, where 4 advanced races uses elements of the periodic table as a common language, it could be that, much simpler than creating a math language.
It’s definitely a contender, I’m not sure it’s “much simpler” though. There is no simple option, it will likely be the most challenging linguistic problem the world has ever faced.
Assuming the periodic table will be the same is a huge leap. @themeatbridge@lemmy.world did a good job of explaining why in another comment. To paraphrase, our periodic table is limited to our perspective of the elements. There could be other even more accurate, and descriptive ways to fully encompass what an element is.
Maths already is a language of sorts, with logic built in. Whereas the periodic table is a technical description of elements.
I would imagine that aliens wouldn’t just show up and try to figure things out from scratch. If they really wanted to communicate peacefully, I’d guess that they’d hide behind a nearby celestial object and listen to our radio signals. They’d want to minimize uncertainty and fear. By the time they let us detect them, they’d probably already be fluent in several major languages.
Can’t remember the author or title.
Old short story where humans land on a planet where the advanced species has gone extinct.
The Terrans have no way of translating the language until someone finds a classroom and figures out what they used for the periodic table.
A Fire Upon the Deep maybe? I think they found what amounted to a preschool?
No idea. Read it in high school and that’s a while back.
This was a stargate episode also im pretty sure.
the 4 great races uses periodic table elements to universally communicate.
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No aliens smart enough to conquer the limitations of light-speed will have any way to understand the concept of war. It’s that stupid.
Aliens have been helping us develop super intelligent AI to bridge the gap between our species
if an alien race interstellar/intergaltic, wanted war, they communicate by starting blasting/orbital bombardment from space as a demonstration.
If someone has tech to do interstellar trips in a reasonable time, we already lost any war against them.
The good news is, they probably don’t need anything that we have, so the list of reasons to engage in war is kinda limited. Yay!
About communication, they would have an advantage understanding us, we are broadcasting into space for more than a century with radio signals carrying content of many of our languages.
The movie Arrival does an quite OK job showing how could be an effort to bridge the communication gap with aliens (besides the fiction), and is a good movie as well.
maybe to entertain them, us as ZOO animals.
Or, for religious/ritual purposes.
“Oh hey, you guys have liquid water? We’ll take that!”
“Well I guess we could trade you a few thousand liters…”
“Trade? Liters? No, we’ll just take it. All of it.”
Any mineral that you can think of, easier to get in space, close to their home star than here.
What if they’ve already used all of it in stellar-scale structures? And they’re takingall of one or a few type of mineral from all rocky planets as they travel through the galaxy?
Biomass is just about the only thing you couldn’t find out in the asteroid belt, and there’s little reason a species from a different biosphere would want any of our biomass.
Alas, it turns out that human cerebrospinal fluid is heroin to their biology. We’re going to get farmed like opium poppies.
I wonder if they’ve heard of the benefits of free range organic farming
Water isn’t particularly hard to find, and the recipe for making liquid water out of solid water is dead simple
The Dark Forest, book two of the Three Body trilogy, delves into this idea. Great read and I won’t spoil it.
