Raymond Hickey (Cambridge University Press)
WHAT language might an alien use? As a speculative answer, Denis Villeneuveâs epic sci-fi movie Arrival couldnât be more intriguing. Louise the linguist is asked to board a spaceship to interpret circles of ink spattered onto glass by ghostly, seven-limbed heptapods. Their circularity expresses the aliensâ non-sequential view of time.
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One of the many robust joys of Raymond Hickeyâs magisterial Life and Language Beyond Earth is the blunt confidence with which he dismisses Arrivalâs circle-language. âNo animal would use such a short-supply resource as their ink for primary communication,â he writes.
Hickey doesnât have much time for genuinely âweird lifeâ, as he calls it. His mission is to hypothesise about how âexobeingsâ, as he calls them, might acquire languages, and he starts from the one test case he is sure about â us.
Just like humans, says Hickey, in order to be sentient and purposeful, an alien would have to develop a ârunaway brainâ, one with capacities beyond those needed to survive. To construct machinery such as communication devices, they would need dexterous limbs and digits â and âa language-like communication systemâ to coordinate their activities, he says.
As he considers the ways aliens might hear or produce noises, or how their ability to move their bodies in space might shape the metaphors in their discourse, Hickeyâs exobeings form in your mind. But they are more like the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise than Arrivalâs heptapods. That is, Hickey imagines language-using aliens will be essentially humanoid entities, with some minor evolutionary divergences.
He makes clear that, out of all possible âcontactâ events, only receiving a signal from beyond our solar system is remotely likely. The next most probable is discovering exoplanets that donât just emit âbiosignaturesâ of life, but âtechnosignaturesâ too.
So, no encounters with time-bending heptapods, writes Hickey. But maybe meaningful blocks of patterned, language-like information will reach us â if exo-civilisations are, or have been, beaming them out.
Hickeyâs teeming yet coherent study makes the claim that, if we assume they are language-users like us, we will be better able to pick the alien needle out of all those intergalactic haystacks.
Pat Kane is a writer based in Glasgow and London
