Would we be able to translate alien radio signals?

[Safe-Keeper]

So with all the hype surrounding the Pentagon UAP report and all that, I've been thinking. If we assume that there's intelligent life relatively close to earth, and that their radio signals reach us. Let's say they broadcast for decades, and that their content is much the same as ours - everything from news reports to radio dramas.

If this radio chatter was all we had to go on, would we be able to translate their language? Sure, if their language was anything like ours (let's assume for convenience they had vocal chords like we do), we'd hear some words a lot more often than others, and we'd probably pick up on some things - if certain words/sounds preceded every conversation, for example, we'd know it was probably some kind of greeting or formality, something like "hello, good to see you" or "welcome to the show, today's topic is...". But how much headway could we make beyond the basics? Would we be able to interpret and understand their emotions, assuming they have any to begin with?

So... I just have this feeling we wouldn't make much progress beyond the basics I mentioned. What do you think? Provided we receive alien radio signals, would we be gifted with the knowledge that we aren't alone, and have the luxury of listening to decades of everything from broadcasts to radio chatter from another intelligent species, but be unable to learn anything about them since it'd all be Greek to us?

 

[sackett]

If they have broadcast TV (pore critters) we'd eventually be able to decode that and assemble images. That would help immeasurably in learning how they communicate and, presumably, what.

Unless they have a vastly different culture, it would get boring pretty fast. Or it might anyway.

 

[gnome]

I find it interesting to consider what aliens would make of our tv shows. Like, laugh tracks (or even genuine studio audio reactions) might perplex them. "What is that noise that plays every few lines?"

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[Roger Ramjets]

If we assume that there's intelligent life relatively close to earth, and that their radio signals reach us. Let's say they broadcast for decades, and that their content is much the same as ours - everything from news reports to radio dramas.

If this radio chatter was all we had to go on, would we be able to translate their language?

Since we are already in the realm of science fiction, I used our own media as a proxy. Examining a random sample of science fiction movies and TV shows I found that 87% of aliens spoke perfectly understandable American English (though sometimes with a slightly 'foreign' accent). Of the rest, 10% had English subtitles or were translated on-screen by other characters, and a further 2% could be understood by their body language. The other 1% were uttering sounds that didn't appear to have any meaning. From this I conclude that American English is a universal language spoken by most intelligent life in our galaxy, even long ago in galaxies far far away.

Therefore, assuming that their content is 'much the same as ours', translating the words shouldn't be a problem. However we may sometimes have trouble understanding what they are talking about, and might have to listen to decades of their chatter to get the context.

Unless they have a vastly different culture, it would get boring pretty fast.

Like our own? Imagine receiving broadcasts from actual aliens(!) and discovering they are a little too much like us. Far from having the answers to Life the Universe and Everything, they are struggling with the same problems we are, and dealing with them just as badly.

 

[jollyroger85]

So with all the hype surrounding the Pentagon UAP report and all that, I've been thinking. If we assume that there's intelligent life relatively close to earth, and that their radio signals reach us. Let's say they broadcast for decades, and that their content is much the same as ours - everything from news reports to radio dramas.

If this radio chatter was all we had to go on, would we be able to translate their language? Sure, if their language was anything like ours (let's assume for convenience they had vocal chords like we do), we'd hear some words a lot more often than others, and we'd probably pick up on some things - if certain words/sounds preceded every conversation, for example, we'd know it was probably some kind of greeting or formality, something like "hello, good to see you" or "welcome to the show, today's topic is...". But how much headway could we make beyond the basics? Would we be able to interpret and understand their emotions, assuming they have any to begin with?

So... I just have this feeling we wouldn't make much progress beyond the basics I mentioned. What do you think? Provided we receive alien radio signals, would we be gifted with the knowledge that we aren't alone, and have the luxury of listening to decades of everything from broadcasts to radio chatter from another intelligent species, but be unable to learn anything about them since it'd all be Greek to us?

You don't even know if an alien civilization presumably notably more advanced than we are would even use radio. Gotta love the anthromorphism.

 

[lomiller]

You don't even know if an alien civilization presumably notably more advanced than we are would even use radio. Gotta love the anthromorphism.

"radio" in this context means modulated EM waves. Alien civilizations would use these because so far as we know there is nothing else they can use. They would probabaly use much the same frequencies and modulation schemes we do for most of the same reasons. Some types of systems (digital, frequency hopping, etc) may be almost impossible to reconstruct just by listening though.

 

[Belz...]

We'd need a lot of material, and some sort of basis, for a translation.

Look how long it took to translate hieroglyphics until we found the Rosetta stone.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Even if we couldn't decode the message, we would still get a ton of information from it.

 

[angrysoba]

We'd need a lot of material, and some sort of basis, for a translation.

Look how long it took to translate hieroglyphics until we found the Rosetta stone.

Why can’t we ask them to send us their Rosetta Stone?

Actually, facetiousness aside, the Rosetta Stone might not be a good analogy given that we only had a long dead language to work with in the case of ye olde Egyptian.

In the case of aliens it will be a presumably living language and they will be able to send more clues than just some old stone. They could actually send their own Rosetta Stone broadcasts “How to I understand our languages.” With some basic level starters.

On the other hand, we may be as dumb and worthless to them as ants are to us so they might not give a **** about communicating to us in a cooperative way.

 

[Delvo]

No.

It's even worse than most people who would say "no" imagine. The first step is to decode the signal into pictures and/or sounds, and we don't even know the right format for that, so we wouldn't be working with pictures or sounds. We'd just have some kind of representation of the modulations in the signal. Even if any of the contents just happened to coincidentally be something like a Rosetta Stone, would wouldn't be able to see the stone.

 

[Ziggurat]

Actually, facetiousness aside, the Rosetta Stone might not be a good analogy given that we only had a long dead language to work with in the case of ye olde Egyptian.

In the case of aliens it will be a presumably living language and they will be able to send more clues than just some old stone. They could actually send their own Rosetta Stone broadcasts “How to I understand our languages.” With some basic level starters.

Maybe. But it's still going to be effectively a dead language, even if it comes with a starter kit. Signal transit times are going to be measured in years, at a minimum. So there really wouldn't be any real back and forth dialogue for a very long time.

On the other hand, we may be as dumb and worthless to them as ants are to us so they might not give a **** about communicating to us in a cooperative way.

They might feel that way regardless of relative intelligence levels.

 

[Lithrael]

What’s more likely, intercepting some kind of generic chatter or receiving intentional ‘looking for life’ signals? When we send the latter we do obvious, easy to decode mathy things to try to make it clear what to do with the raw signals.

 

[dann]

Examining a random sample of science fiction movies and TV shows I found that 87% of aliens spoke perfectly understandable American English (though sometimes with a slightly 'foreign' accent). Of the rest, 10% had English subtitles or were translated on-screen by other characters, and a further 2% could be understood by their body language. The other 1% were uttering sounds that didn't appear to have any meaning. From this I conclude that American English is a universal language spoken by most intelligent life in our galaxy, even long ago in galaxies far far away.

Your samples may appear to be random to you, but they are actually anglocentric.

 

[rjh01]

There is also the problem of distance. The radio transmitters would be built so that they are powerful enough to be heard anywhere locally. They are not built to be heard light-years away.

 

[angrysoba]

The answer, then, is it depends…

 

[smartcooky]

There is also the problem of distance. The radio transmitters would be built so that they are powerful enough to be heard anywhere locally. They are not built to be heard light-years away.

Yup. The inverse-square law is a bitch!

 

[theprestige]

If they have broadcast TV (pore critters) we'd eventually be able to decode that and assemble images.

Or would we?

 

[theprestige]

You don't even know if an alien civilization presumably notably more advanced than we are would even use radio. Gotta love the anthromorphism.

Gotta start somewhere. Why not start with what we know? Plus there's nothing particularly anthropomorphic about EM field manipulation. There's no reason to think that noticing fundamental facts about the universe is a typically human quality.

 

[smartcooky]

No.

It's even worse than most people who would say "no" imagine. The first step is to decode the signal into pictures and/or sounds, and we don't even know the right format for that, so we wouldn't be working with pictures or sounds. We'd just have some kind of representation of the modulations in the signal. Even if any of the contents just happened to coincidentally be something like a Rosetta Stone, would wouldn't be able to see the stone.

This.

Put it this way - if the situation was reversed, how on earth (no pun intended) are the aliens going to understand that the extremely faint signal they are detecting is an amplitude modulated raster signal at around 15kHz imposed on a carrier wave with a frequency modulated sub-carrier.

Unless their development very much paralleled our own, they would have no idea what the signal meant or how to interpret it.

No. The only probable way one civilisation might recognise intelligent transmissions from another would be something similar to the way Carl Sagan wrote about in Contact. First you get their attention by broadcasting prime numbers, then you hugely amplify and rebroadcast their own signal back to them.

As for a Rosetta stone, well, there is a possible point of commonality that might help - a sort of "universal Rosetta stone".

If I were "broadcast" the following numbers (they would be broadcast in binary but I will list them here in decimal for convenience) I wonder if anyone will guess what I am driving at..


1 1 1
1 18 4

2 1 7
2 2 9
2 13 11
2 14 12
2 15 14
2 16 16
2 17 19
2 18 20

3 1 23
3 2 24
3 13 27
3 14 28
3 15 31
3 16 32
3 17 35
3 18 40

and I'll stop there. Any takers?

 

[malbui]

Maybe. But it's still going to be effectively a dead language, even if it comes with a starter kit. Signal transit times are going to be measured in years, at a minimum. So there really wouldn't be any real back and forth dialogue for a very long time.

In one of his stories Asimov suggested that the best way to communicate over long distances - for this story it was within the solar system - was to eschew ideas of back and forth dialogue in favour of everybody talking all the time. I was rather taken with that idea when I read it 40 years ago.