Many people have asked the question: are there other intelligent beings living elsewhere in the universe?
And many have further gone on to ask: if there are, how can we communicate with them?
If there are intelligent beings living on other planets, they will certainly have a language to communicate with one another. Presumably, however, it will be vastly different to ours. So, if one day we contact them, how will we be able to talk to them?
We can derive hope from the fact that, to some extent, we are already able to communicate basic messages to other earth-based species, without language but with simpler forms of communication predicated around body language, gestures, and vocalisations.
From 1974, the hope that we might one day be able to communicate with beings from another planet drove American Frank Drake to use what was then the biggest radio telescope in the world to send a message to the Hercules globular cluster of stars.
Assuming that intelligent beings would understand maths, which is a universal form of communication based on numbers, he used the binary code across two different radio frequencies to communicate how humans count, what we look like, and more. Today, this is remembered as the first radio message to be sent to aliens.
Of course, many questions remain. Will the aliens be as good at maths as we hope? If they receive it, will they understand our message? Will they want to say something back, and if they do, will it be friendly?
All these questions have inspired countless literary and cinematic works and continue to fascinate us today.
Here at 101translations, we’d like to be the first to say that if we do make contact with an alien civilisation, we’ll be very quick to get some of them on the payroll, because – as we all know – good translations are essential for communication.
Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/gray-scale-photo-of-human-face-sMPRCsoUM4A
