Good job as usual, Issac. Here is something I was wondering when watching the video, though: It's a popular science fiction trope for aliens to look at human video signals and seriously confuse certain things, mostly being unable to tell the difference between a factual documentary and a fictional movie, or the difference between sex and wrestling in a few cases. How likely do you think this would happen in real life?
Probably not too like Tekro though its hard to say. Decently likely at first glance, just from lack of familiarity. I mean a thrown punch on an early TV show tends to clearly miss so they might get very confused studying that thinking it wasn't a violent action to punch someone, same as putting a hand on a shoulder or cheek isn't, but I'd guess they'd realize it was acting to show a strike not hurt the other person for real pretty quickly. I don't believe many would not get fiction either. Storytelling ought to be an initial language use for almost everyone, and you would expect that to result in skepticism about stories where they are biased, boastful, or inaccurate even when not intentionally fictional. Deception is simply to advantageous not to be fairly common, especially for smart creatures who get value out of their brain exactly from such things. They are likely then to understand deception and have a delineation between purposefully lying and just being wrong or exaggeration for conveying a point. We use very exaggerated language when talking to kids, who also first learn to communicate that way too, intentionally being louder and more upset in tone then they need to be with the purpose of getting Mom's attention. "Mommy I need you" and "Get out of my territory or I'll hurt you" are two of the most basic forms of communication, and both tend to get exaggerated quickly "I'm gonna die" for a kneescrape and "I'm bigger" efforts to seem larger when confronting a threat. So I think they'd all get falsehood with degrees and I'm sure it would work in stories. The tribal shaman telling the tale of the hunt and gesturing the stabbing motions and such.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story entitled "The Dancing Fool", in "Breakfast of Champions" about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club. ― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Fun fact: We mammals use to have more photoreceptors but we lose them some time around the Jurasic, probably because the need to adapt to a nocturnal life style. Primates later re-invented color vision but we still unable to see ultraviolet. Thanks Dinosaurs.
Most mammals' color vision is like that of dogs. They only see yellow and blue, with yellow including red and green. Just like what our host described for deer. It was some ancestors of the Old World simians that distinguished red, by duplicating the yellow receptor and specializing each copy in different directions. That's a common process of gene evolution.
Not really. They were pre-adapted for the Permian-Triassic oxygen low caused by the Siberian Traps. Mammalian ancestors were kicking butt until then, and dinosaurs were losing the arms race. But those wonderful avian air sacs evolved fully during this period, allowing dinosaurs to out compete mammalian ancestors. When oxygen recovered at the beginning of the Jurassic, this increased respiratory efficiency allowed dinosaurs to get really big on the larger side, and evolve flight on the smaller side. Since color vision is metabolically expensive, nocturnal mammals lost color receptors. It's not a matter of primitive or advanced, really. It's a matter of useful under which conditions. And in large portions of the world, flightless birds almost suppressed the supposed Age of Mammals. Read Peter Ward's "Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere". It delves into respiration as a major evolutionary component.
@@SilkenLuna What in the world are you taking about? Dinosaurs were "more advanced" than us?? In what way? "More advanced" at laying eggs? "More advanced" at growing large? "More advanced" at building skyscrapers? "More advanced" at sending rockets to space??
Speaking of your intro and a species not having a word for "war": One thing to note is that if an alien race is always at war, they don't need a word for it. For example, in CS Lewis's Paralandra the very peaceful aliens he meets don't have a word for "Peace" because they don't understand war. An alien race that doesn't understand peace would have the opposite problem.
***** Paralandra was a book in CS Lewis's space trilogy. Surprisingly he wrote sci-fi, and in fact this book was his favorite of all his writings. The trilogy explores theological implications of alien life. In it, there's an alien race which is living in an Edenic state of existence. However, Satan (called the Unman) has managed to possess a human body and travel to this planet, hoping to trick the native species into committing original sin like he did on Earth. The hero, a linguist named Ransom, travels to Paralandra to tell their version of Eve (named Tinidril) not to listen to the Unman. He has difficulty because the Tinidril doesn't understand the concept of malice and genuinely can't understand that the Unman wants to hurt her people. SPOILER: Both Ransom and the Unman make their case to Tinidril. The Unman is extremely hard to debate with since he has unlimited stamina and superhuman intellect. Eventually, Ransom realizes that debate is futile and unnecessary, so instead he comes up with a plan B: Beat the shit out of the Unman, which works.
***** IIRC, the debating happens over several days, as after debating it for a while, Tinidril would decide to think about the issue later and go do something else. During these periods of down time, the Unman would proceed to harass Ransom to prevent him from sleeping, ect. It hadn't occurred to him to just kill the Unman until after a while, and he killed him while Tinidril wasn't present.
A paragon of bad manners, no doubt; maybe that's why you spent too much time. Or was it because it's easy to shoot down the normal expressive, suggestive normal sort of idiomatic language people use in UA-cam comments while ignoring my central criticism
Or they would have multiple words for peace, with different annotations. Take friends: We have friend, ally, confidant, acquaintance... each with specific connotations.
Isaac, you need to do an episode on the commons of every/most alien civilizations, everything from basic technologies to how we evolved and what our civilizations would believe in.
I'd be interested to hear what you think are the 10 most likely things, even if the list were volatile. EDIT: Actually, I'm curious what kind of thought process would be required to hash out the nuance of, say, the subjunctive mood. I was thinking about that when I wrote "were".
Very, and those were some of the first TV programs. I'd also imagine a lot of radio shows talked about TV when it was first coming out and probably about radio when it first came out. Probably lots of early radio remarks about its strength and limitations as a communication tool with commentary about facial expression.
English is hardly the only language and differences in languages bring in another level of complexity in understanding aliens. If humans have countless languages aliens can do to. Or if they have only one than multiple human languages may confuse them. Hardly a unskipable obstacle but there is just layer upon layer upon layer of complexity in translating alien means of comunication. With out same physiology and similar concepts. Just analisin patterns may lead to utter bullshit. Whbere noise is taken for message and massage for noise.s
yes but as noted in the video, they could pinpoint the sources of our radio waves based on the doppler effect. after that its not that hard to realize that different areas use different languages. this could even be an advantage for them because the knowledge about what differs between languages will tell them exactly what all our languages have in common
Imagine that even if aliens only had one language, our radio signals will have many different languages. They will have great trouble understanding them when different words sound similar between languages. Also langauges like Chinese where separate words have meaning, but have a different meaning when combined with others.
Pieter, there weren't very many stations early one, especially broadcasting loudly, and almost all were in a handful of major languages. Short of some sort of drive that let's you jump through intervening space you should always hear the oldest radio first.
oh man way do i hear douglas adams giggle? "[...] the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. [...]" -douglas adams hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
Babylon 5 drove me mad with this. I don't know how often someone said "Oh, we have never met these aliens before. Our computers are working on their language. Give it a few hours."
That actually ought to be enough considering the presumed processing power involved, but that's assuming they were actively communicating at high speed, which likely would be the case in such an alien rich environment, you know, constantly emitting your own dictionary and language guide as a signal, tens of thousands of words a minute. Hacking a language from a few hours of overhearing just one person speaking strains credulity though, and they did do that a lot.
B5 at least had sometimes lines like "send the language files" or "they are accessing our database(I hope its the one intended for general visitors)". Some aliens knowing the wrong language is even used as a plot point. The Star Trek universal translator gives me much more headache - B5 is a matter of processing power, from properly prepared first contact messages something that current of the shelf tech could do. But the UT simply lacks the input data. That can't be solved with processing power...
Star Trek Voyager actually thought thing out differently from before on a few episodes: One episode, the aliens communicated and controlled their technology by chemical inputs. The aliens, which looked like large arthropods, used their appendages to transmit and receive commands/information from their ship by direct touch. This was a problem for the crewmember B'Lanna Torres when one of them attached itself to her and hooked into her endocrine system. It was killing her but knew of no other why to communicate.
Greetings. Understanding languages is a matter of how much software you have, the more the better (more software means more intelligent). It takes a long time to build the understanding that goes into any universal translator. You can’t have universal translators that work with new species, so there can be no language exchange of any kind. A recent version of this mistake is on the Enterprise TV series. Yes, their universal translator needs to gain experience (build software) with alien languages, which is good. But then they use a human (Hoshi Sato) translating an unknown language (“Fight or Flight” the Axanar language) in real-time in an emergency. They present their junior communications officer as a language expert, and a “genius” (that can magically have a technical exchange in an unknown language). The core of this mistake is that the author thought that a human brain had built in language hardware support (like a universal language co-processor) that enabled any biological human to interpret all languages with just the barest snippets of input information. All mental abilities are learned, and exist as software in the cortex memory system. So Hoshi needs to learn her languages over a long time, not in a few minutes (presumably using her super biology). Her understanding of anything will be precisely the sum of her learning. This is why (all things being equal) older people are typically much smarter than younger people. Older people have simply been learning and gaining experience over a longer period, so they have stored more software. They can bring more preexisting software to bear in their problem solving in general (and more software means more intelligence). Said another way, the bigger your mind software the smarter you are. Thanks for listening.
I just discovered your channel, and have been soaking it up like a sponge! I find your channel very thought provoking, and highly intelligent! It's definitely a refreshing take on subject matter that's been done like no other!
Its interesting (to me) what the likelihood of obligate aquatic civilization developing. At first you seem to have a cap on tool use because almost everything in the water looses fitness if it deviates from a streamlined shape. Octopuses, though, are highly capable of manipulating their environment. As of now, their limitation in learning and the value of cumulative learning is their short lifespan. Octopuses can communicate visually by a potentially extremely high bandwidth modulation of their shape and color patterns.
Problem is space travel. They'd have to break the ocean depths and the atmosphere to get into space. Land and air travel would be alien enough terrain for them as is.
@@NodDisciple1 Being underwater would almost certainly impose impossibly high barriers to certain technologies, too. I don't care how clever any theoretical octopus is, I just don't see how they could ever develop metallurgy, for instance
@Madam Meouff evolution is a falicy. Far too many missing pieces. Evolution needs to be reclassified as adaptation. Evolution requires elimination and replacement. Adaptation is a midstream living change in the ability to survive and employ the will to live on a subducted, coinciding combining level. Without the misuse of the term evolution, and the political science based teachings of Darwin, the entire narrative of big bang disintegrates. The postulation is full of holes. It would also steer people's understanding back to a biblical basis. The powers that be, have been trying to eradicate the Bible for centuries.
@@talltroll7092 I think you're just not looking at all the possibilities. Plenty of aquatic animals are extremely sensitive to electricity and magnetism. Some of them can produce electricity by themselves. Some of them produce their own illumination. An intelligent, electroreceptive species advancing just as far as basic record keeping could skip what took humans thousands of years: a complete theory of electromagnetism. You don't need fire, but you do need metal. In human history free gold was the first metal used and you can find that underwater too. Meteoric iron would be almost immediately destroyed in the ocean but on a planet with an outer ice shell it would be studded with meteoric iron. On planets without an ice crust they would still have an oxygen rich atmosphere, they would still have floating photosynthetic life, they would still have lightning and, though rare, fire, even with no land. Access to hydrothermal vents and the chemistry that they bring could help an awful lot. You can thank YT's comment notification system for taking a year to bother to tell me that I had replies to any comments.
Isaac, you really possess the gift to convey complex and non trivial ideas in a very clear and easy to follow fashion. This skill is as rare as unicorns. Good ole´Sagan comes to my mind regarding this ability. You are my favorite yt channel now.
The best channel on YT. No doubt. ❤ No one else would be able to force an hyperactive person like me to stare into the same video for half an hour and and at the end make me sad that the video is over.
12:43 gives me a shivers dude. it's absolutely awe-inspiring that some concepts transcend _everything_, and that our understanding of them could unify us with other intelligent lifeforms on the mutual basis of our curiosity and scientific endeavours.
You know, I never really 'understood' that episode. How can you communicate entirely in metaphors in any language and yet not understand the meaning of individual words in that same language? That never made sense to me.
Oh its total nonsense Jason, its a great episode and really puts the alien back into alien language, but it's utter nonsense on examination. Consider that we're told those aliens had no self-identity, while at the same time we hear them talking about Darmok and Jelad, two famous dudes with names. That's like saying that aliens have no sense of rank & hierarchy, and to keep that in mind when you speak to their president and high council. It's nonsensical unless followed with "because their leaders are whoever happens to be near the table of leadering at the time, so today's president is the janitor who was polishing it when we came in asking for an audience." I think they were aiming for the idea of a language that wasn't just heavy on euphemisms but was essentially nothing but them, which doens't work too well especially in a high-tech civ where precision is need. For instance we get "Mirab, with sails unfurled" as a sort of 'go', the language would need a way for the pilot to ask "Where, or which way, and how fast?", "Unfurled mightily?" "No, unfurled lightly, and shaded the sun", that sort of thing.
It's definitely a fascinating episode exploring the idea that technology might have limits (universal translator), and a language that is both understandable enough for a mainstream TV show but incomprehensible enough to feel truly alien. But indeed it doesn't really stand up too well if you examine it closely. Works great for narrative purposes though. XD
I'm glad to see the silliness of it wasn't just from my own shortcomings in comprehension then. Having Asperger's Syndrome, I wasn't sure but that I was simply failing to 'get' something that was perfectly obvious to anyone else. lol
What if their spoken language is only a subset of their language? What if their spoken language has only to do with arranging mating? What if they, like us, have many many languages and alphabets? The Star Trek TNG episode about a language that only expresses metaphor was a spectacular example of language subsets.
I can't remember where I heard this, but some work of fiction mentioned aliens that had redundant organs because they communicate by ripping said organs out of each other. Scary stuff.
Yeah but keep in mind that ripping off different organs is hugely wasteful, and generating taste generating chemicals on their skin creates the same issues as communicating through smell.
They'd think it was a warning that if they came here there might be a diplomatic mess due to two local planets going at it? At least until they get the part about it being fiction much later on...if they got that at all.
Great episode on xenolinguistics. The only other thing I would add is the fact that there are a number of languages broadcast, it might be very difficult to determine which language is being used. There's not just the one language that they are trying to decode. but all of them. However, they could then show up with the ability to rudimentaly understand all major languages.
Hard to say, I think it would actually help in the long run, easier to distinguish certain underlying human concepts of language from that. Some aliens might only have ever had one language but they should not assume we;d speak their language, so concluding we might have multiple ones ought not be too hard for them to grasp either. They'd not be exposed to very many either, early broadcasting was only in a few and would always be the same on a given channel. Matching our own languages to each other as they go might actually make translation easier.
Isaac Arthur I think that once they get television signals of educational programs language will be a breeze. If you were to beam the entire production history of Sesame Street across the galaxy, aliens would know concepts like the alphabet, simple words, how to read our language, our number system, and social interactions and customs. However, when they show up they might want to talk to Big Bird...
Isaac Arthur I think that aliens that had only ever had one language would find it much harder to learn a completely new one with next to no similarities, they wouldn't have any experience doing it as a species so might not know the techniques involved. Although if they have computers then they probably would understand cryptography and deciphering and be able to apply the tricks there to language.
+Michael We actually know some languages they do the opposite, ie. they only have words for absolute directions, but none for relative ones. Aboriginal is one such language. That doesn't hurt them at all and it helps them find their way around. About only ever having had a single language - that seems very unlikely, unless they are a hive mind species, but even then they would probably try to get along with fauna that exhibits partial signs of intelligence and communication, and that should help. Why it seems unlikely: language changes with distance. Unless they only happen to have a single continent on their planet, language would be altered around the world. Same as Latin morphed into ~10 languages as more people without direct contact started speaking it.
Man I love your channel, when I found it and to this day, it has been a gold mine. Never stop what you are doing, you are the best content creator of this type of content on UA-cam. Even the older videos (such as this at the time of writing) have a consistent tone, quality, and professionalism.
This was an awesome presentation. I myself have often wondered how we would actually beable to communicate with ALIENS. How would we be able to understand each other? 🤔 Fascinating. 👍
I have a question. Won't radio waves be unusable for Aliens after they have been in space for hundreds of years? Wont they need to have a gigantic, almost solar system mega structure to pick them up and structure them into something reasonable?
No, not at a few hundred light years, and our own signals haven't gotten that far yet. We could pick up our stronger channels with our best current equipment at that distance. You'd have to aim at those stars individually and listen, but there are a finite number of stars, especially plausible stars, in that volume. But yes to pick them up with ease, especially at greater distances than that, you do start needing a lot more large space-based telescopic arrays. Hence the commentary about computers doing most of the work, I'd expect them to have them by then. You need basic computers to do just about anything with space and unless your species has a bizarre block or phobia about chemistry you ought to notice semiconductors and their switch value very soon after entering that age of things.
Isaac Arthur So at least for a few hundred light years all is fine. Good. I wonder whether they can do it at a few thousand as well? I do believe that what you are saying about semiconductors should be obvious to them at some point, the megastructure part was what was giving me pause. Thanks for the info.
Well, at some point radio signals become so weak that you'd only be able to see rare individual photons. We can estimate the distance at which this happens by looking at the power and frequencies that humans are broadcasting at. It's actually surprisingly hard to find real data on this, so we can set an upper limit by looking at the maximum broadcasting power allowed of a radio station, which is about 100 kW, and assuming a best case but very unrealistic frequency of about 10 Hz. With a little math, we can see that at 100,000 ly, our radio signal weakens to about 1 photon per square meter per second. At best we probably need something like 8 bit sound to be intelligible, so we have to divide this number by 2^8, or about 250, which means we can only go out to about 400 ly. Maybe we could stretch this to 1000 ly with some really good detective work on the part of the aliens. Real radio signals are broadcast at more like 100 MHz which shrinks 1000s of lys down to just a few.
even if they did, radio signals coming from here are not all in English. It could prove difficult to distinguish between Earth languages in the first place.
Unless the aliens use NTSC or PAL broadcast standards, I don't think they would be able to watch our analog TV signals. It's even less likely that they'd be able to decipher digital signals because they would have to first recognize that it's a video signal encoded as a digital signal, then they would have to somehow reverse-engineer the codec and figure out all the numerous compression methods we use.
NTSC has short gaps in the signal that indicate the start of a new line and a longer gap that indicates the start of a new frame. Since these parts of the signal are regular, guessing the lines may form a grid should be plausible. Once they have that, corresponding signal amplitude to brightness will produce an image. Audio is transmitted in a frequency just above the video signal, so that should be easy to isolate. Color is more complicated, idk Digital would be a nightmare to reverse engineer for so many reason, how we transfer the signals making detecting those signals way harder being but one of the issues
Andrei Tarkovsky made a couple of these. Solaris and Stalker, based on books by Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky Brothers, respectively. Lem, in particular, was of the mindset that we would never be able to effectively communicate with another "intelligence," because they would be too exotic, too different from us. I am of this belief as well. So yeah, if you want realism, and you're in the mood for two of the greatest films ever made, try Solaris (not the stupid, artless reboot with Clooney) and Stalker.
These videos are great, Issac! Your in-depth analysis of these themes are a real resource to me (mumble-as a sci fi writer-mumble) and I appreciate your expertise. Your back-catalogue is about to get a violent perusing!
:) Amusingly the original video (which is quite horrible from a production standpoint) was made for SF authors, I never meant to develop that into a channel, it evolved out of an irritation with Scifi not having enough space stations and me at the time getting asked about them a lot at a worldbuilding forum I was active in at the time. An awful lot of the early episodes are really about correct portrayal of alien planets and such, because it seemed a better approach than doing a paper with diagrams :)
Happy accidents like that are the best gifts! And I'll certainly have to discover why you feel there should be more space stations. Also, if what I'd gleaned from some of the comments earlier are correct, I'd like to thank you for your service. Sincerely. I'm actually really psyched that you responded to me. Once a video's got 600 comments or more, I felt I would have to wait until your next upload to have a chance at getting noticed. I’d really actually like to get your opinion on the convention of gravity manipulation you see so much of in sci-fi. I’ve been trying to decide if having the ability to create “artificial” gravity (not the centrifugal variety) on a ship would mean things like gravity lances and other uber advanced tech and weapons should also exist. I didn’t REALLY want to go there for what I’m working on, but I’d at least like to know so I can be able to throw in a McGuffin of some sort to explain why they DON’T if I decide to go that way. PS: have your read the webcomic Schlock Mercenary by Howard Taylor? I think you'd like it.
This is the most addictive video channel ever for me. I often find myself sitting up way past my bedtime on workdays listening to them. You're losing me a lot of sleep :)
There remains the problem of translating e.g. EM signal into e.g. audio/video. While analog signal seems relatively simple to decode, modern digital one isn't - not only because of frequently used encryption, details of transmission protocols (like multi-frequency OFDM) ... but data compression also becomes more and more complex and is approaching the perfect noise to maximize information rate - without having the exact specification, decoding a modern video compression seems a nearly impossible task ... even the last layer: entropy coding, which exploits the fact that common events carry less information, is extremely difficult to decode without the exact details (used probabilities). ps. At least in theory, a natural language (of an advance civilization) could be optimized by using some entropy coding techniques - kind of compressing let say a sentence into a single symbol, like in Arrival, making direct search for single words futile ...
But how to decode the modern digital signals will almost certainly be discussed in general terms on those radio stations before conversion. Its hard to translate a book in a language you've never seen before if it is also encrypted, less so if you know its encrypted and already know the language.
Sure, there are available software decoders of video compressors, but you would need access our internet first - even if we accidentally broadcast it, it would be a trillionth part of noise we produce, again behind various complex noise-resembling protocols. Regarding encryption, modern one is based on the Kerckhoffs's principle, saying that the strength is not in unknown algorithm, but the crypto-key itself. And encrypted data should look like perfect noise: independent Pr(0)=Pr(1)=1/2 bit sequence. Modern 256 bit AES would need like 10^100 years on standard computers to break. Unless aliens have time-loop computers ( www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/5qa2p0/game_changer_3_ultimate_computing_timeloop/ ), it is rather safe.
If they have been listening to our signals form the past few decades (after the signals reach them), they might notice an increasing shift towards encryption and an increase in encryption complexity over time. Of equal note, is that the “air waves” have become crowded to the point of overlapping at some ranges. If all that they have to go by is what we are putting out now, it might be confused with noise, while still being distinct from the background.
I saw the little bit at the beginning about the closed caption / your speech impediment... and I just want to say that you, sir, are an amazing person. I don't think that your speech impediment gets in the way of your communication, and I am inspired by how you are fearlessly and competently putting your content on UA-cam. Keep up the good work, Mr. Arthur. Keep the spark of my imagination strong.
Maybe I've just missed this because I was doing something else while listening to this, but how will they figure out that radio waves are meant to be translated into audio? Why not assume that they should be translated into smell or interpreted as they are? Edit: Also, here's another question... How will they be able to tell that we use multiple different languages? What if they only use one language that's biologically determined or something? Couldn't that fuck up their attempts to use things like frequency analysis? Edit 2: Nevermind, he addresses it after I posted this comment.
Isaac Arthur Pretty common in Australia, there are even comedy pieces about how expensive it is, one being 'I Stopped Eating Smashed Avocado and Now I Own a Castle'
Haha yep. It's something one of our politicians here in Australia said... that "youths cannot afford to buy houses because they treat themselves to smashed avocado at cafes", which was patently bullshit and he's been mocked for it so rigorously that it became a meme.
Has anyone encountered any other channels that produce such high-quality, in-depth discussion about these subjects (extra-terrestrial life, biology, future technology, physics, etc in particular)?? If so, please tell me about them. I need more
just mentioning, aliens probably would never be able to decode our tv signals, our compression is as sophisticated as it is arbitrary. Figuring out that this data is even supposed to fit into a 2d plane will be nearly impossible to anyone who doesn't know the specs. I work with video encoding tech on the base level. Its ridiculously complicated and there is nothing in the binary stream that hints to the kind of data contained or the kind of encoding used, this will not get figured out. Color is not even encoded in rgb in video normally but into weird yuv color spaces that only make sense regarding the kind of compression we use and how our own vision regarding different contrasts and wavelengths work, non of which they could ever know.
The problem with old transmissions is that their analog nature causes the data to probably be pretty much completely gone after traveling long distances through space and second we did probably never broadcast details about the first digital format that followed which is pretty much impossible to decode already without knowledge about the encoding process and the type of data contained because bandwidth was very limited at the beginning even for lowres footage. Its kinda like trying to decode something encrypted with a one-time-pad and no additional knowledge. The only hope is that mathematical quirks like rsa or aes are more universal than we thought so they came up with it independently and still remember their old tech and would try it out on our modern data because there is a lot of pretty much uncompressed but encrypted stuff around.
Well they can see "Rosetta Stone" where they see analog and then maybe see a digital broadcast of the same thing on a different frequency. Or just observe analog signals and then digital later and figure it out.
I think, they'll try any possible way the data could make sense and use AI or so for it. They will soon figure out that some parts of the data is somehow repeating and in the end by running gazillions of tries they will understand us.
Or individuals never move, and the only conversations they have are about properties of systems of connectivity in chemistry (networks/graphs), communicated by scents with an alphabet of 100,000 distinctively different scent molecules. And they work out how to use pheromones to encourage researchers to stay and communicate for longer, while never understanding that different researchers are different individuals.
"You want to be able to talk as fast as you can think." I can think of an Emenem rap but no way I can rap that fast. It'd just come out as bebebebteededbedbiebibieob.
For a minimal intergalactic dictionary, terms like "fluid" and "metabolism" might be a helpful than "liquid", "water", "treacle", "lava", "clouds" etc… and "health", "wellbeing", etc…
Hum... sorry but going back to that opening opening segment of yours, they have many words for war to indicate different types of war... well, don't we have that as well? I mean for starters there are the debatable compound words such as civil-war, holy-war or war-of-sucession but we also have terrorism, insurgencies, rebellions, police actions, crusades and so on. I know it was a simple example but it does seem an oversight a prepared xeno-linguist would be unlikely to make.
@@TP-tc7vp Quite frankly, I think Darwinism would encourage a sufficiently advanced faction to have at least some degree of combat capability for mere survival, let alone to thrive.
Interestingly, we *do* have species on earth that rely heavily on scent for communication.... plants. Many species such as tomatoes communicate information about nearby predators or reproductive status through volatile organic compounds (VOCs). As suggested, its not terribly fast--several seconds to send a message--but plants aren't fast moving to begin with. But it does give support to the idea that even with different sensory modalities, we could figure out what was said. There are machine learning algorithms being applied to devices that measure VOCs in order to monitor forest health and detect emerging threats such as drought by using computers to eavesdrop on the trees.
tonio103683 well, there are bilingual radio emissions, translation of songs from English to country's tongue, even "learn foreign language" ones. as soon as they get one, it'll be really easy to grasp many of our languages!
Could lead to an interesting early hypothesis that the different language groups were actually different species, and the English speaking ones DID have claws.
From all episodes i have seen, i find this one of the most mindblowing (among with the whole Alien Civilizations series). No matter how often if seen it, i'm am always amazed anew.
One great subject that you bring up is high bandwidth communication and. You touched on this a little bit in your transhumanism video how fast and detailed individuals could potentially communicate. Even without augmentation, constructed languages like Ithkuil could potentially allow communication 5 to 6 times the speed of natural languages with greater precision (Kozlovsky 2004). Computer mediated communication which you discussed at the end is probably the ultimate goal since it is lossless (no room for basic misunderstandings) and extremely high density. One might consider the aesthetic possibilities of poetry, music, and literature using this medium! Thanks again for your insightful videos.
New viewer here. A great analysis of communication. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the “smell” communication as I kept thinking of the Red Dwarf episode Tongue Tied where Dave Lister is reading from the Felis Sapiens Book of Smeg which was written in lines of scent.
I have recently stumbled upon your channel and I haven't watched all of your videos yet but this was incredibly insightful and probably one of the best videos you have posted so far. Thank you. I now see the human species differently and in awe. The human body is fascinating and our culture even more so.
Yes, but we have several dominant tongues for trade and diplomacy. English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. They will probably focus mainly on those (as they are used the most in international affairs), and then decide to use one of them for initial contact. My money on it either being English (still the main language of Trade), Mandarin (a rising power in the trade field due to China's increased influence), or French (the most commonly used "diplomatic" language used in EU meetings).
The food the lady was eating seems to be an open faced sandwich consisting of a fried egg, yellow peppers, and guacamole....? Holy crap that looks terrible
I love your videos man! And you always say you have a speech impediment and i don't know if that's because English isn't my first language but i have no problem in understanding what you say and I'd listen for hours and hours! ( indeed that's exactly what i do) thanks for all those interesting and well made videos, they're really inspiring!
Just a nit pick, analog TV broadcasts aren't made up of 3 greyscale images. In order to ensure backwards compatability, color broadcasts made the electron beam wobble a little to illuminate colored filters of red grean and blue as it made its usual sweep over the screen... So if anything they (the aliens) will probably not notice much more than a slightly nosier signal, and the result would still be a single black and white image if you didn't build the reciever to take that wobble and utilize it correctly. It would just be marginally more fuzzy. Of course, we humans love to brag about our accomplishments and I'm sure that this trick for backwards compability would be well explained within the broadcasts especially since we are assuming that these aliens have been cataloguing our broadcasts since we first started using morse code. And the concept of color has been talked about over the radio well before color TV and technicolor film processes... So the aliens would have plenty of time to prepare their understanding of color even if they haven't been able to see stuff from us in the mean time. The problem comes later when we switch from analog to digital and the stray waves of signals drastically drop as we start to shift to systems that don't waste energy broadcasting the signals into semingly empty space so they will find us very hard to ... Well... Listen to.
It's not that the signal made the electron beam wobble. The TV, if it was a color model, decoded that signal and modulated the beams of three independent electron guns. These were mounted side by side (or in a triangle), but aimed the same point on a mask the screen, so that their beams would arrive at slightly different angles.The mask then allowed electrons from each gun to pass through and strike the red/green/blue phosphor dots, which were side by side (or in a triangle) on the screen.
Now I'm kinda wondering what the suicide numbers will be among alien scientists whose job it is to listen to Top 40 pop station all day. I'm also wondering how many will be able to sing More than Feeling beat for beat after listen to classic rock for 30 years. Any plans to make any merchandise? I kinda want a shirt to display my love of this channel.
what surprises me is after all the Arrival and Girl's Sandwich comments not one person has referenced the 80's pop song in the episode, ah well. Yeah I suspect they'd have folks spend a lot of time on our pop music. No merchandising notions yet, maybe down the road, something for after the 100k subscriber mark.
Ironically, they might still be "fascinated" just simply because it's not theirs and it's "different" from their norms. I mean, consider what music would have been considered "trash" amongst many of the ancient Romans and yet a modern scientist worth his salt in historical academia would be thrilled to get even a snippet of it just merely to get some data on that ancient civilization.
If an Alien can deconstruct and understand our speech from radio signals light years away then I'm sure they could do the same from a radio signal originating 4 feet away.
Bellacasi III really? You didn't think they had a word for war?? BELLigerent ParaBELum BELLicose...war is literally in their name. Doesn't bellacasi 3, when translated from Latin mean 'the third house of war' or 'the third dynasty of war'?
I wrote a novel about blind, deaf, dumb aliens who communicate by smell. Their bodies are riddled with tiny pores that emit different scents. By combining scents they have developed a complex language. They have communications systems and even computers that reproduce smells instead of audio or video.
Ignoring the flamebait aspect of that remark, objectively speaking from an anthropological standpoint the show would be an absolute gold mine. It's the same guy discussing basically currents events and human psychology for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week for almost 30 years and being transmitted from tons and tons of different stations and transmitters mostly located in one region. That would be like coming across a thousand volume history of Cesarean Rome written by the same author, biased to his perspective but containing a damn near perfect download of life then.
Or imagine them getting audio recordings of Hitler, or more modern, the fat man who sounds like he has a greasy set of hamburgers stuck in his his throat and gets stupid people to buy his bogus junk... Jones or whatever.
One of the first signals they would get is Hitler's Sportspalast speech..soo uh, hope not? (There are discussions if that transmission was to weak for reaching space but idk)
Fermi Paradox theory: some the first implementations of radio was by Hitler to broadcast his speeches. The aliens know we exist but all have come to the agreement, "stay away from those humans, they ain't right in the head!"
My theory was partially joking. Secondly, I believe morality is not subjective. Thirdly, this is not a moral argument, but an argument of logic. I am sure any species that have gotten intelligent to the level can understand the concept of genocide. When viewing another civilization's radio broadcasts and for example intercepted Hitler's speeches and followed up with journalism at the time, and eventually a documentary or two on the Holocaust they can infer that at least some humans are violent, even to the point of genocide. So logically based on Hitler's speeches a civilization could come to the conclusion that making contact with or sharing technology with humans could lead to potential conflict in the future. Not a Fermi Paradox solution, because one civilization might just say, "Lets wipe them out before they are a threat." In the end my theory was just a joke in a UA-cam comments section. lol
Maitland Jones Radio was around for a littlenwhile before Hitler. By the time he was giving radio broadcast speeches, other people were too. What I'm wondering is how confused aliens would be if they heard the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
@@MaitlandJones But what about the post WWII signals? Not exactly ideal, but they at least show there'd be humans willing to engage in talks w/o firing a shot first.
I really love that Stargate SG1 episode where the Asgard have a test in place that requires knowledge about the circle to pass. I think we could build the ultimate rosetta stone for aliens based on math and other sciences. Like define numbers by relating unary(counting, like | = 1_2 = 1_10, || = 10_2 = 2_10, and so on) to binary and decimal, define hydrogen as an atom with 1 proton and write down it's (estimated) freezing point and boiling point in Kelvin, etc... From what atoms are we can get to molecules like water, and so on.
I really do agree with you, some of our early tv shows were the best even I Love Lucy because the television and radio were the only means of information available for the average family not like today with every device you can ware or carry connected to the internet
In a nutshell, they learn structure then they learn what things mean using tv. On screen there are objects ASBD, and there are some words, the words will be different each time and objects too, but if there's let's say a nuclear reactor, then there would always be a picture of that and with a large enough dataset, the other words and objects would turn into background noice, while that object would be consistently here. AI'S use this from like 2014 on professional scale
actually - differentiating languages is reeally easy - you don't need to understand them at all - as long as you can somewhat seperate the sources you will notice that some aources use certain patterns really frequently that otheres never use at all - put an advancedcomputer to itand you have a 99.9% reliable seperat distinction of languages in minutes - although without actually understanding any of it
juste kevin They'd probably just start by learning the most prevalent and/or politically dominant language, and then we've already done all the translation work for them.
Yes, I think so, too. It can evolve from camouflage, which is really advantageous, over social signalling, just as in cephalopods, to a very complex and high-bandwidth language.
The film 13th Warrior has a pretty well done sequence where Antonio Banderas' character discerns the local tongue by constant frequency analysis around the campfire, and we pick up the words as he does.
Isaac’s analysis made me think Stanislaus Lem’s His Master’s Voice, and Solaris , andJohn Brunner’s Total Eclipse - all tales of how understanding of aliens can evade us.
I like to imagine in a few million years that alien civilization trying to uncover humans from just our signals sees this video and understands that we knew how they had uncovered our language and culture.
Incidentally, since folks have been asking, no I have not seen the movie Arrival yet
Maybe do an update after you did. If you didn't talk about aliens living in higher dimensions yet it would be a good reason to do so.
Good job as usual, Issac. Here is something I was wondering when watching the video, though: It's a popular science fiction trope for aliens to look at human video signals and seriously confuse certain things, mostly being unable to tell the difference between a factual documentary and a fictional movie, or the difference between sex and wrestling in a few cases. How likely do you think this would happen in real life?
Nice spoiler.
Probably not too like Tekro though its hard to say. Decently likely at first glance, just from lack of familiarity. I mean a thrown punch on an early TV show tends to clearly miss so they might get very confused studying that thinking it wasn't a violent action to punch someone, same as putting a hand on a shoulder or cheek isn't, but I'd guess they'd realize it was acting to show a strike not hurt the other person for real pretty quickly.
I don't believe many would not get fiction either. Storytelling ought to be an initial language use for almost everyone, and you would expect that to result in skepticism about stories where they are biased, boastful, or inaccurate even when not intentionally fictional. Deception is simply to advantageous not to be fairly common, especially for smart creatures who get value out of their brain exactly from such things. They are likely then to understand deception and have a delineation between purposefully lying and just being wrong or exaggeration for conveying a point. We use very exaggerated language when talking to kids, who also first learn to communicate that way too, intentionally being louder and more upset in tone then they need to be with the purpose of getting Mom's attention.
"Mommy I need you" and "Get out of my territory or I'll hurt you" are two of the most basic forms of communication, and both tend to get exaggerated quickly "I'm gonna die" for a kneescrape and "I'm bigger" efforts to seem larger when confronting a threat. So I think they'd all get falsehood with degrees and I'm sure it would work in stories. The tribal shaman telling the tale of the hunt and gesturing the stabbing motions and such.
lol, SPOILERS please, but yeah I will probably discuss the idea of 4D+ physical universes some time.
Magnificent analysis as always.
Thanks John!
I don't know why, but I always get a kick out of it when I see one of my favorite channels commenting on another.
JMG!!!!! love your channel too bro!
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story entitled "The Dancing Fool",
in "Breakfast of Champions" about a tragic failure to communicate.
Here was the plot:
A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Like seeing Superman compliment the Green Lantern. COOL!
Fun fact: We mammals use to have more photoreceptors but we lose them some time around the Jurasic, probably because the need to adapt to a nocturnal life style. Primates later re-invented color vision but we still unable to see ultraviolet.
Thanks Dinosaurs.
Most mammals' color vision is like that of dogs. They only see yellow and blue, with yellow including red and green. Just like what our host described for deer. It was some ancestors of the Old World simians that distinguished red, by duplicating the yellow receptor and specializing each copy in different directions. That's a common process of gene evolution.
Yep. But there is evidence sugesting that that wasn't always the case and I always found it "funny" XD
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781854/
Well, dinosaurs were, and are more advanced than us. I don't see this as "their fault". They have gotten there faster. That's it.
Not really. They were pre-adapted for the Permian-Triassic oxygen low caused by the Siberian Traps. Mammalian ancestors were kicking butt until then, and dinosaurs were losing the arms race. But those wonderful avian air sacs evolved fully during this period, allowing dinosaurs to out compete mammalian ancestors. When oxygen recovered at the beginning of the Jurassic, this increased respiratory efficiency allowed dinosaurs to get really big on the larger side, and evolve flight on the smaller side.
Since color vision is metabolically expensive, nocturnal mammals lost color receptors. It's not a matter of primitive or advanced, really. It's a matter of useful under which conditions. And in large portions of the world, flightless birds almost suppressed the supposed Age of Mammals. Read Peter Ward's "Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth's Ancient Atmosphere". It delves into respiration as a major evolutionary component.
@@SilkenLuna What in the world are you taking about? Dinosaurs were "more advanced" than us?? In what way?
"More advanced" at laying eggs? "More advanced" at growing large? "More advanced" at building skyscrapers? "More advanced" at sending rockets to space??
Speaking of your intro and a species not having a word for "war":
One thing to note is that if an alien race is always at war, they don't need a word for it.
For example, in CS Lewis's Paralandra the very peaceful aliens he meets don't have a word for "Peace" because they don't understand war. An alien race that doesn't understand peace would have the opposite problem.
War is one of the ways to communicate and exchange information with other different means(not only capture, destroy and such)
***** Paralandra was a book in CS Lewis's space trilogy. Surprisingly he wrote sci-fi, and in fact this book was his favorite of all his writings. The trilogy explores theological implications of alien life.
In it, there's an alien race which is living in an Edenic state of existence. However, Satan (called the Unman) has managed to possess a human body and travel to this planet, hoping to trick the native species into committing original sin like he did on Earth. The hero, a linguist named Ransom, travels to Paralandra to tell their version of Eve (named Tinidril) not to listen to the Unman. He has difficulty because the Tinidril doesn't understand the concept of malice and genuinely can't understand that the Unman wants to hurt her people.
SPOILER: Both Ransom and the Unman make their case to Tinidril. The Unman is extremely hard to debate with since he has unlimited stamina and superhuman intellect. Eventually, Ransom realizes that debate is futile and unnecessary, so instead he comes up with a plan B: Beat the shit out of the Unman, which works.
***** IIRC, the debating happens over several days, as after debating it for a while, Tinidril would decide to think about the issue later and go do something else.
During these periods of down time, the Unman would proceed to harass Ransom to prevent him from sleeping, ect.
It hadn't occurred to him to just kill the Unman until after a while, and he killed him while Tinidril wasn't present.
A paragon of bad manners, no doubt; maybe that's why you spent too much time. Or was it because it's easy to shoot down the normal expressive, suggestive normal sort of idiomatic language people use in UA-cam comments while ignoring my central criticism
Or they would have multiple words for peace, with different annotations. Take friends: We have friend, ally, confidant, acquaintance... each with specific connotations.
I love the alien logic that humans must have claws because they keep on referring to their claws. this is hilarious
Every single video, I learn something I've never even heard of or even considered before. Thanks for broadening my knowledge :)
Thanks for saying that, makes my day :)
That "I've got your back" t-shirt... I want one of those.
Maybe someday soon Isaac and this channel will have their own shirts.
stardude692001 probley the only one I would actualy buy from one of these youtube channels.
Debries
Give it back. I need it.
Isaac, you need to do an episode on the commons of every/most alien civilizations, everything from basic technologies to how we evolved and what our civilizations would believe in.
lol, how in the world would I get all that in one episode?
I'd be interested to hear what you think are the 10 most likely things, even if the list were volatile.
EDIT: Actually, I'm curious what kind of thought process would be required to hash out the nuance of, say, the subjunctive mood. I was thinking about that when I wrote "were".
Imagine the treasure trove of information educational TV programmes would give aliens... everything from kids shows to technical documentaries.
Very, and those were some of the first TV programs. I'd also imagine a lot of radio shows talked about TV when it was first coming out and probably about radio when it first came out. Probably lots of early radio remarks about its strength and limitations as a communication tool with commentary about facial expression.
English is hardly the only language and differences in languages bring in another level of complexity in understanding aliens. If humans have countless languages aliens can do to. Or if they have only one than multiple human languages may confuse them. Hardly a unskipable obstacle but there is just layer upon layer upon layer of complexity in translating alien means of comunication. With out same physiology and similar concepts. Just analisin patterns may lead to utter bullshit.
Whbere noise is taken for message and massage for noise.s
yes but as noted in the video, they could pinpoint the sources of our radio waves based on the doppler effect. after that its not that hard to realize that different areas use different languages. this could even be an advantage for them because the knowledge about what differs between languages will tell them exactly what all our languages have in common
Imagine that even if aliens only had one language, our radio signals will have many different languages. They will have great trouble understanding them when different words sound similar between languages. Also langauges like Chinese where separate words have meaning, but have a different meaning when combined with others.
Pieter, there weren't very many stations early one, especially broadcasting loudly, and almost all were in a handful of major languages. Short of some sort of drive that let's you jump through intervening space you should always hear the oldest radio first.
oh man way do i hear douglas adams giggle?
"[...] the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and
bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation. [...]"
-douglas adams hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
Babylon 5 drove me mad with this. I don't know how often someone said "Oh, we have never met these aliens before. Our computers are working on their language. Give it a few hours."
That actually ought to be enough considering the presumed processing power involved, but that's assuming they were actively communicating at high speed, which likely would be the case in such an alien rich environment, you know, constantly emitting your own dictionary and language guide as a signal, tens of thousands of words a minute. Hacking a language from a few hours of overhearing just one person speaking strains credulity though, and they did do that a lot.
B5 at least had sometimes lines like "send the language files" or "they are accessing our database(I hope its the one intended for general visitors)". Some aliens knowing the wrong language is even used as a plot point.
The Star Trek universal translator gives me much more headache - B5 is a matter of processing power, from properly prepared first contact messages something that current of the shelf tech could do. But the UT simply lacks the input data. That can't be solved with processing power...
Star Trek Voyager actually thought thing out differently from before on a few episodes: One episode, the aliens communicated and controlled their technology by chemical inputs. The aliens, which looked like large arthropods, used their appendages to transmit and receive commands/information from their ship by direct touch. This was a problem for the crewmember B'Lanna Torres when one of them attached itself to her and hooked into her endocrine system. It was killing her but knew of no other why to communicate.
Greetings. Understanding languages is a matter of how much software you have, the more the better (more software means more intelligent). It takes a long time to build the understanding that goes into any universal translator. You can’t have universal translators that work with new species, so there can be no language exchange of any kind.
A recent version of this mistake is on the Enterprise TV series. Yes, their universal translator needs to gain experience (build software) with alien languages, which is good. But then they use a human (Hoshi Sato) translating an unknown language (“Fight or Flight” the Axanar language) in real-time in an emergency. They present their junior communications officer as a language expert, and a “genius” (that can magically have a technical exchange in an unknown language).
The core of this mistake is that the author thought that a human brain had built in language hardware support (like a universal language co-processor) that enabled any biological human to interpret all languages with just the barest snippets of input information. All mental abilities are learned, and exist as software in the cortex memory system. So Hoshi needs to learn her languages over a long time, not in a few minutes (presumably using her super biology). Her understanding of anything will be precisely the sum of her learning. This is why (all things being equal) older people are typically much smarter than younger people. Older people have simply been learning and gaining experience over a longer period, so they have stored more software. They can bring more preexisting software to bear in their problem solving in general (and more software means more intelligence). Said another way, the bigger your mind software the smarter you are.
Thanks for listening.
Maybe she was a savant, or came from a genetically engineered lineage or something?
I just discovered your channel, and have been soaking it up like a sponge! I find your channel very thought provoking, and highly intelligent! It's definitely a refreshing take on subject matter that's been done like no other!
6:00; poached eggs on yellow heirloom tomatoes, mashed avocados and light rye toast. you share your knowledge, i share mine (i am a chef) :D
So those are tomatoes, I was thinking maybe peppers or something.
With cilantro, right? And are those pieces of oats on the toast or rye, please? THANKS.
@@efisgpr It is indeed coriander here and there on the toast (In your diaclect called "cilantro") yes.
Its interesting (to me) what the likelihood of obligate aquatic civilization developing. At first you seem to have a cap on tool use because almost everything in the water looses fitness if it deviates from a streamlined shape.
Octopuses, though, are highly capable of manipulating their environment. As of now, their limitation in learning and the value of cumulative learning is their short lifespan.
Octopuses can communicate visually by a potentially extremely high bandwidth modulation of their shape and color patterns.
Problem is space travel. They'd have to break the ocean depths and the atmosphere to get into space. Land and air travel would be alien enough terrain for them as is.
@@NodDisciple1 Being underwater would almost certainly impose impossibly high barriers to certain technologies, too. I don't care how clever any theoretical octopus is, I just don't see how they could ever develop metallurgy, for instance
@Madam Meouff evolution is a falicy. Far too many missing pieces. Evolution needs to be reclassified as adaptation. Evolution requires elimination and replacement. Adaptation is a midstream living change in the ability to survive and employ the will to live on a subducted, coinciding combining level. Without the misuse of the term evolution, and the political science based teachings of Darwin, the entire narrative of big bang disintegrates. The postulation is full of holes. It would also steer people's understanding back to a biblical basis. The powers that be, have been trying to eradicate the Bible for centuries.
@@talltroll7092 I think you're just not looking at all the possibilities. Plenty of aquatic animals are extremely sensitive to electricity and magnetism. Some of them can produce electricity by themselves. Some of them produce their own illumination.
An intelligent, electroreceptive species advancing just as far as basic record keeping could skip what took humans thousands of years: a complete theory of electromagnetism.
You don't need fire, but you do need metal. In human history free gold was the first metal used and you can find that underwater too. Meteoric iron would be almost immediately destroyed in the ocean but on a planet with an outer ice shell it would be studded with meteoric iron.
On planets without an ice crust they would still have an oxygen rich atmosphere, they would still have floating photosynthetic life, they would still have lightning and, though rare, fire, even with no land.
Access to hydrothermal vents and the chemistry that they bring could help an awful lot.
You can thank YT's comment notification system for taking a year to bother to tell me that I had replies to any comments.
@@peaknuckle6942 My dude, that is pure word salad. I'm now dumber for having read your comment.
I do love the idea of aliens debating what our words mean. Great video btw, a lot of this stuff I never even considered.
Isaac, you really possess the gift to convey complex and non trivial ideas in a very clear and easy to follow fashion. This skill is as rare as unicorns. Good ole´Sagan comes to my mind regarding this ability. You are my favorite yt channel now.
The best channel on YT. No doubt. ❤
No one else would be able to force an hyperactive person like me to stare into the same video for half an hour and and at the end make me sad that the video is over.
12:43 gives me a shivers dude. it's absolutely awe-inspiring that some concepts transcend _everything_, and that our understanding of them could unify us with other intelligent lifeforms on the mutual basis of our curiosity and scientific endeavours.
Darmok and Jelad at Tenagra.
“Shaka, when the walls fell.”
You know, I never really 'understood' that episode. How can you communicate entirely in metaphors in any language and yet not understand the meaning of individual words in that same language? That never made sense to me.
Oh its total nonsense Jason, its a great episode and really puts the alien back into alien language, but it's utter nonsense on examination. Consider that we're told those aliens had no self-identity, while at the same time we hear them talking about Darmok and Jelad, two famous dudes with names. That's like saying that aliens have no sense of rank & hierarchy, and to keep that in mind when you speak to their president and high council. It's nonsensical unless followed with "because their leaders are whoever happens to be near the table of leadering at the time, so today's president is the janitor who was polishing it when we came in asking for an audience."
I think they were aiming for the idea of a language that wasn't just heavy on euphemisms but was essentially nothing but them, which doens't work too well especially in a high-tech civ where precision is need. For instance we get "Mirab, with sails unfurled" as a sort of 'go', the language would need a way for the pilot to ask "Where, or which way, and how fast?", "Unfurled mightily?" "No, unfurled lightly, and shaded the sun", that sort of thing.
It's definitely a fascinating episode exploring the idea that technology might have limits (universal translator), and a language that is both understandable enough for a mainstream TV show but incomprehensible enough to feel truly alien.
But indeed it doesn't really stand up too well if you examine it closely.
Works great for narrative purposes though. XD
I'm glad to see the silliness of it wasn't just from my own shortcomings in comprehension then. Having Asperger's Syndrome, I wasn't sure but that I was simply failing to 'get' something that was perfectly obvious to anyone else. lol
What if their spoken language is only a subset of their language? What if their spoken language has only to do with arranging mating? What if they, like us, have many many languages and alphabets? The Star Trek TNG episode about a language that only expresses metaphor was a spectacular example of language subsets.
an alien ate my arm.
turns out it communicates using taste.
well said Cris jijijijijijij
Jeez. I hope you tasted good or you just started a war.
I can't remember where I heard this, but some work of fiction mentioned aliens that had redundant organs because they communicate by ripping said organs out of each other. Scary stuff.
+The twilitHero Doctor Who maybe
Yeah but keep in mind that ripping off different organs is hugely wasteful, and generating taste generating chemicals on their skin creates the same issues as communicating through smell.
I wonder how they'd react when they get the 1938 broadcast of "War of the Worlds" on radio. :P
Would they have a concept of stories?
300 years later, lol.
Omega of Gallifrey As Isaac said in this video, it is likely that they have stories
They'd think it was a warning that if they came here there might be a diplomatic mess due to two local planets going at it? At least until they get the part about it being fiction much later on...if they got that at all.
What if they thought it was for real and sent an armada to help us?
YET ANOTHER ISAAC AR-THURSDAY!!!!
Great episode on xenolinguistics. The only other thing I would add is the fact that there are a number of languages broadcast, it might be very difficult to determine which language is being used. There's not just the one language that they are trying to decode. but all of them. However, they could then show up with the ability to rudimentaly understand all major languages.
Hard to say, I think it would actually help in the long run, easier to distinguish certain underlying human concepts of language from that. Some aliens might only have ever had one language but they should not assume we;d speak their language, so concluding we might have multiple ones ought not be too hard for them to grasp either. They'd not be exposed to very many either, early broadcasting was only in a few and would always be the same on a given channel. Matching our own languages to each other as they go might actually make translation easier.
Isaac Arthur I think that once they get television signals of educational programs language will be a breeze. If you were to beam the entire production history of Sesame Street across the galaxy, aliens would know concepts like the alphabet, simple words, how to read our language, our number system, and social interactions and customs. However, when they show up they might want to talk to Big Bird...
Isaac Arthur I think that aliens that had only ever had one language would find it much harder to learn a completely new one with next to no similarities, they wouldn't have any experience doing it as a species so might not know the techniques involved. Although if they have computers then they probably would understand cryptography and deciphering and be able to apply the tricks there to language.
+Michael We actually know some languages they do the opposite, ie. they only have words for absolute directions, but none for relative ones. Aboriginal is one such language. That doesn't hurt them at all and it helps them find their way around.
About only ever having had a single language - that seems very unlikely, unless they are a hive mind species, but even then they would probably try to get along with fauna that exhibits partial signs of intelligence and communication, and that should help. Why it seems unlikely: language changes with distance. Unless they only happen to have a single continent on their planet, language would be altered around the world. Same as Latin morphed into ~10 languages as more people without direct contact started speaking it.
Man I love your channel, when I found it and to this day, it has been a gold mine. Never stop what you are doing, you are the best content creator of this type of content on UA-cam. Even the older videos (such as this at the time of writing) have a consistent tone, quality, and professionalism.
Issac,
I, for one, think you have a uniquely awesome voice. It's definitely one of my top 5 favorite UA-camr voices.
No CC 4 me.
This was an awesome presentation. I myself have often wondered how we would actually beable to communicate with ALIENS. How would we be able to understand each other? 🤔 Fascinating. 👍
I have a question. Won't radio waves be unusable for Aliens after they have been in space for hundreds of years? Wont they need to have a gigantic, almost solar system mega structure to pick them up and structure them into something reasonable?
No, not at a few hundred light years, and our own signals haven't gotten that far yet. We could pick up our stronger channels with our best current equipment at that distance. You'd have to aim at those stars individually and listen, but there are a finite number of stars, especially plausible stars, in that volume. But yes to pick them up with ease, especially at greater distances than that, you do start needing a lot more large space-based telescopic arrays. Hence the commentary about computers doing most of the work, I'd expect them to have them by then. You need basic computers to do just about anything with space and unless your species has a bizarre block or phobia about chemistry you ought to notice semiconductors and their switch value very soon after entering that age of things.
Isaac Arthur
So at least for a few hundred light years all is fine. Good. I wonder whether they can do it at a few thousand as well?
I do believe that what you are saying about semiconductors should be obvious to them at some point, the megastructure part was what was giving me pause. Thanks for the info.
Well, at some point radio signals become so weak that you'd only be able to see rare individual photons. We can estimate the distance at which this happens by looking at the power and frequencies that humans are broadcasting at. It's actually surprisingly hard to find real data on this, so we can set an upper limit by looking at the maximum broadcasting power allowed of a radio station, which is about 100 kW, and assuming a best case but very unrealistic frequency of about 10 Hz.
With a little math, we can see that at 100,000 ly, our radio signal weakens to about 1 photon per square meter per second. At best we probably need something like 8 bit sound to be intelligible, so we have to divide this number by 2^8, or about 250, which means we can only go out to about 400 ly. Maybe we could stretch this to 1000 ly with some really good detective work on the part of the aliens.
Real radio signals are broadcast at more like 100 MHz which shrinks 1000s of lys down to just a few.
even if they did, radio signals coming from here are not all in English. It could prove difficult to distinguish between Earth languages in the first place.
Ya, even on earth signal boosters are needed for clear transmission.
A friend introduced me to one of your videos and I've been watching them for the past 3 hours and I love them. Keep up the good work!
Thanks Logan!
Unless the aliens use NTSC or PAL broadcast standards, I don't think they would be able to watch our analog TV signals. It's even less likely that they'd be able to decipher digital signals because they would have to first recognize that it's a video signal encoded as a digital signal, then they would have to somehow reverse-engineer the codec and figure out all the numerous compression methods we use.
An AI could easily do it
NTSC has short gaps in the signal that indicate the start of a new line and a longer gap that indicates the start of a new frame. Since these parts of the signal are regular, guessing the lines may form a grid should be plausible. Once they have that, corresponding signal amplitude to brightness will produce an image. Audio is transmitted in a frequency just above the video signal, so that should be easy to isolate. Color is more complicated, idk
Digital would be a nightmare to reverse engineer for so many reason, how we transfer the signals making detecting those signals way harder being but one of the issues
brilliant video.
Keep them coming. You're quickly becoming my go to sources for random topics in all things Astro. . brilliant work!
I loved Arrival, we need more movies that instead of making aliens about war and destruction but in other more realistic situations.
Careful, don't spoil the film for me...
Hitchhiking Vagabond
I wrote a book slightly along those lines...
There was nothing realistic about Arrival. It was just a stale universalist gospel.
Andrei Tarkovsky made a couple of these. Solaris and Stalker, based on books by Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky Brothers, respectively. Lem, in particular, was of the mindset that we would never be able to effectively communicate with another "intelligence," because they would be too exotic, too different from us. I am of this belief as well. So yeah, if you want realism, and you're in the mood for two of the greatest films ever made, try Solaris (not the stupid, artless reboot with Clooney) and Stalker.
Yes ABSOLUTELY!
Sandwich at 6:00 looks incredible, good pick Isaac.
Gosh, I think the thing looks ghastly to be honest :)
YES! I've been waiting for this one for my novels :D Thank you!
These videos are great, Issac! Your in-depth analysis of these themes are a real resource to me (mumble-as a sci fi writer-mumble) and I appreciate your expertise. Your back-catalogue is about to get a violent perusing!
:) Amusingly the original video (which is quite horrible from a production standpoint) was made for SF authors, I never meant to develop that into a channel, it evolved out of an irritation with Scifi not having enough space stations and me at the time getting asked about them a lot at a worldbuilding forum I was active in at the time. An awful lot of the early episodes are really about correct portrayal of alien planets and such, because it seemed a better approach than doing a paper with diagrams :)
Happy accidents like that are the best gifts! And I'll certainly have to
discover why you feel there should be more space stations. Also, if
what I'd gleaned from some of the comments earlier are correct, I'd like
to thank you for your service. Sincerely.
I'm actually really psyched that you responded to me. Once a video's got 600 comments or more, I felt I would have to wait until your next upload to have a chance at getting noticed.
I’d really actually like to get your opinion on the convention of gravity manipulation you see so much of in sci-fi. I’ve been trying to decide if having the ability to create “artificial” gravity (not the centrifugal variety) on a ship would mean things like gravity lances and other uber advanced tech and weapons should also exist. I didn’t REALLY want to go there for what I’m working on, but I’d at least like to know so I can be able to throw in a McGuffin of some sort to explain why they DON’T if I decide to go that way.
PS: have your read the webcomic Schlock Mercenary by Howard Taylor? I think you'd like it.
I think once they pick up cooking shows the eminent beings of the Gastronomy sector will be very intrigued.
I'm sure their superior technology could assist us in locating the lamb sauce.
They be like I bet these creatures taste like chicken. Because chicken is universal.
You don't think they'd be terrifed of Gordon Ramsay? Or a more warrior-like race might challenge him to a duel?
@@IronWarhorsesFun Unless they are chickens.
@@moonled true! like Colonel Sanders!
This is the most addictive video channel ever for me. I often find myself sitting up way past my bedtime on workdays listening to them. You're losing me a lot of sleep :)
"Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper fits this episode really well.
Didn't expect to see you here
I love your content man, thank you so much for all the work you clearly put into these videos.
There remains the problem of translating e.g. EM signal into e.g. audio/video. While analog signal seems relatively simple to decode, modern digital one isn't - not only because of frequently used encryption, details of transmission protocols (like multi-frequency OFDM) ... but data compression also becomes more and more complex and is approaching the perfect noise to maximize information rate - without having the exact specification, decoding a modern video compression seems a nearly impossible task ... even the last layer: entropy coding, which exploits the fact that common events carry less information, is extremely difficult to decode without the exact details (used probabilities).
ps. At least in theory, a natural language (of an advance civilization) could be optimized by using some entropy coding techniques - kind of compressing let say a sentence into a single symbol, like in Arrival, making direct search for single words futile ...
But how to decode the modern digital signals will almost certainly be discussed in general terms on those radio stations before conversion. Its hard to translate a book in a language you've never seen before if it is also encrypted, less so if you know its encrypted and already know the language.
Sure, there are available software decoders of video compressors, but you would need access our internet first - even if we accidentally broadcast it, it would be a trillionth part of noise we produce, again behind various complex noise-resembling protocols.
Regarding encryption, modern one is based on the Kerckhoffs's principle, saying that the strength is not in unknown algorithm, but the crypto-key itself. And encrypted data should look like perfect noise: independent Pr(0)=Pr(1)=1/2 bit sequence. Modern 256 bit AES would need like 10^100 years on standard computers to break. Unless aliens have time-loop computers ( www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/5qa2p0/game_changer_3_ultimate_computing_timeloop/ ), it is rather safe.
If they have been listening to our signals form the past few decades (after the signals reach them), they might notice an increasing shift towards encryption and an increase in encryption complexity over time.
Of equal note, is that the “air waves” have become crowded to the point of overlapping at some ranges. If all that they have to go by is what we are putting out now, it might be confused with noise, while still being distinct from the background.
I saw the little bit at the beginning about the closed caption / your speech impediment... and I just want to say that you, sir, are an amazing person. I don't think that your speech impediment gets in the way of your communication, and I am inspired by how you are fearlessly and competently putting your content on UA-cam. Keep up the good work, Mr. Arthur. Keep the spark of my imagination strong.
ducks duck their heads underwater to look for food so their names are related to duck
Ducks are fucks, but with no Fs to give, and a crazyass D.
Fantastic analysis. This is something I've pondered on for a long time, but a lot of what you put forth I hadn't even considered.
Maybe I've just missed this because I was doing something else while listening to this, but how will they figure out that radio waves are meant to be translated into audio? Why not assume that they should be translated into smell or interpreted as they are?
Edit: Also, here's another question... How will they be able to tell that we use multiple different languages? What if they only use one language that's biologically determined or something? Couldn't that fuck up their attempts to use things like frequency analysis?
Edit 2: Nevermind, he addresses it after I posted this comment.
Just an FYI for anyone interested. Ducks do duck, in shallow water they "duck" their heads under the water to retrieve edibles off the bottom.
Good research on the linguistic front
I could listen to you speaking for hours... your analysis are so clear. Thanks.
I think you can actually listen to me for days now :) Thanks!
looks like the woman in the video clip was eating smashed avocado and eggs on toast
That doesn't sound very appetizing
Isaac Arthur Pretty common in Australia, there are even comedy pieces about how expensive it is, one being 'I Stopped Eating Smashed Avocado and Now I Own a Castle'
Haha yep. It's something one of our politicians here in Australia said... that "youths cannot afford to buy houses because they treat themselves to smashed avocado at cafes", which was patently bullshit and he's been mocked for it so rigorously that it became a meme.
+Isaac Arthur
Ive not tried it, but it sounds nice!
but it also looks like there's a layer of mango slices and I don't know why there has to be three layers of guacamole.
Love your analysis and how you rationally explain issues rather than insult people ideas
Has anyone encountered any other channels that produce such high-quality, in-depth discussion about these subjects (extra-terrestrial life, biology, future technology, physics, etc in particular)?? If so, please tell me about them. I need more
ua-cam.com/users/whatdamath
Been watching you so long I dont need subtitles, your speech has improved so much!!!
just mentioning, aliens probably would never be able to decode our tv signals, our compression is as sophisticated as it is arbitrary. Figuring out that this data is even supposed to fit into a 2d plane will be nearly impossible to anyone who doesn't know the specs. I work with video encoding tech on the base level. Its ridiculously complicated and there is nothing in the binary stream that hints to the kind of data contained or the kind of encoding used, this will not get figured out. Color is not even encoded in rgb in video normally but into weird yuv color spaces that only make sense regarding the kind of compression we use and how our own vision regarding different contrasts and wavelengths work, non of which they could ever know.
Light takes time to travel, they will always hear the oldest stuff first. 1950s TV doesn't need much decoding.
The problem with old transmissions is that their analog nature causes the data to probably be pretty much completely gone after traveling long distances through space and second we did probably never broadcast details about the first digital format that followed which is pretty much impossible to decode already without knowledge about the encoding process and the type of data contained because bandwidth was very limited at the beginning even for lowres footage. Its kinda like trying to decode something encrypted with a one-time-pad and no additional knowledge. The only hope is that mathematical quirks like rsa or aes are more universal than we thought so they came up with it independently and still remember their old tech and would try it out on our modern data because there is a lot of pretty much uncompressed but encrypted stuff around.
Well they can see "Rosetta Stone" where they see analog and then maybe see a digital broadcast of the same thing on a different frequency. Or just observe analog signals and then digital later and figure it out.
I think, they'll try any possible way the data could make sense and use AI or so for it. They will soon figure out that some parts of the data is somehow repeating and in the end by running gazillions of tries they will understand us.
But the could figure it out given enough time. Might take centuries but eventually...
Or individuals never move, and the only conversations they have are about properties of systems of connectivity in chemistry (networks/graphs), communicated by scents with an alphabet of 100,000 distinctively different scent molecules. And they work out how to use pheromones to encourage researchers to stay and communicate for longer, while never understanding that different researchers are different individuals.
"You want to be able to talk as fast as you can think."
I can think of an Emenem rap but no way I can rap that fast. It'd just come out as bebebebteededbedbiebibieob.
For a minimal intergalactic dictionary, terms like "fluid" and "metabolism" might be a helpful than "liquid", "water", "treacle", "lava", "clouds" etc… and "health", "wellbeing", etc…
Hum... sorry but going back to that opening opening segment of yours, they have many words for war to indicate different types of war... well, don't we have that as well? I mean for starters there are the debatable compound words such as civil-war, holy-war or war-of-sucession but we also have terrorism, insurgencies, rebellions, police actions, crusades and so on. I know it was a simple example but it does seem an oversight a prepared xeno-linguist would be unlikely to make.
We do as well, yes...and the implication is that they would be warlike...which we are. If they are as warlike as we are...
@@TP-tc7vp Quite frankly, I think Darwinism would encourage a sufficiently advanced faction to have at least some degree of combat capability for mere survival, let alone to thrive.
Interestingly, we *do* have species on earth that rely heavily on scent for communication.... plants. Many species such as tomatoes communicate information about nearby predators or reproductive status through volatile organic compounds (VOCs). As suggested, its not terribly fast--several seconds to send a message--but plants aren't fast moving to begin with. But it does give support to the idea that even with different sensory modalities, we could figure out what was said. There are machine learning algorithms being applied to devices that measure VOCs in order to monitor forest health and detect emerging threats such as drought by using computers to eavesdrop on the trees.
12:12
That kinds of stuff would probably be avoided by figuring out multiple human languages since those are phrases exclusive to english.
tonio103683 well, there are bilingual radio emissions, translation of songs from English to country's tongue, even "learn foreign language" ones. as soon as they get one, it'll be really easy to grasp many of our languages!
Yes, euphemisms should mostly be cut out by other languages too, but will still cause some trouble.
Could lead to an interesting early hypothesis that the different language groups were actually different species, and the English speaking ones DID have claws.
Turing’s team broke the Enigma cypher by cracking the perfunctory greetings at the ends of each message.
Smells as a written language eh?
Is it the good book of Cloister by any chance?
Strettger THE GOLDEN HAT!
There is no god but Cloister the Stupid and Cat is his prophet
From all episodes i have seen, i find this one of the most mindblowing (among with the whole Alien Civilizations series). No matter how often if seen it, i'm am always amazed anew.
Reminds me of the Twilight Zone classic episode, "To Serve Man".
Which reminds me of the Simpsons Halloween Special parodying that episode :)
D'Oh! I should have mentioned that too! :-)
Ahhhhh, I love this episode, it really put a smile on my face to think that simply with time, effort and data it would be possible
The girl was eating avacado and egg on Rye bread base
Looks really good and cheap to make. Just some avocado or guacamole, rye and eggs. Super healthy and cheap.
That's cheaper than a Denver omelette.
Why?
Brilliant analysis as is typical of your channel. Thanks Issac and team.
Wait, I can produce any smell I want? Coooolll... I'm going full dog.
One great subject that you bring up is high bandwidth communication and. You touched on this a little bit in your transhumanism video how fast and detailed individuals could potentially communicate. Even without augmentation, constructed languages like Ithkuil could potentially allow communication 5 to 6 times the speed of natural languages with greater precision (Kozlovsky 2004). Computer mediated communication which you discussed at the end is probably the ultimate goal since it is lossless (no room for basic misunderstandings) and extremely high density. One might consider the aesthetic possibilities of poetry, music, and literature using this medium! Thanks again for your insightful videos.
What do you think of the movie Arrival?
New viewer here. A great analysis of communication. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the “smell” communication as I kept thinking of the Red Dwarf episode Tongue Tied where Dave Lister is reading from the Felis Sapiens Book of Smeg which was written in lines of scent.
Isaac Arthur,
Imagine playing a video game on a quantum computer!
I have recently stumbled upon your channel and I haven't watched all of your videos yet but this was incredibly insightful and probably one of the best videos you have posted so far. Thank you. I now see the human species differently and in awe. The human body is fascinating and our culture even more so.
Thanks Dan! I hope you enjoy the rest as much.
Wouldn't our multiple languages confuse things a whole heck of a lot?
Yes, but we have several dominant tongues for trade and diplomacy. English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. They will probably focus mainly on those (as they are used the most in international affairs), and then decide to use one of them for initial contact. My money on it either being English (still the main language of Trade), Mandarin (a rising power in the trade field due to China's increased influence), or French (the most commonly used "diplomatic" language used in EU meetings).
Unfortunately for those aliens we have lots of word for torture, fighting, killing, warfare, and making the enemy's life living hell.
The food the lady was eating seems to be an open faced sandwich consisting of a fried egg, yellow peppers, and guacamole....? Holy crap that looks terrible
I know? Revolting isn't it? It probably tastes awesome then.
Yeah, sorry Mr. Arthur, but no thanks to that sandwich.
I love your videos man! And you always say you have a speech impediment and i don't know if that's because English isn't my first language but i have no problem in understanding what you say and I'd listen for hours and hours! ( indeed that's exactly what i do) thanks for all those interesting and well made videos, they're really inspiring!
Just a nit pick, analog TV broadcasts aren't made up of 3 greyscale images. In order to ensure backwards compatability, color broadcasts made the electron beam wobble a little to illuminate colored filters of red grean and blue as it made its usual sweep over the screen... So if anything they (the aliens) will probably not notice much more than a slightly nosier signal, and the result would still be a single black and white image if you didn't build the reciever to take that wobble and utilize it correctly. It would just be marginally more fuzzy.
Of course, we humans love to brag about our accomplishments and I'm sure that this trick for backwards compability would be well explained within the broadcasts especially since we are assuming that these aliens have been cataloguing our broadcasts since we first started using morse code. And the concept of color has been talked about over the radio well before color TV and technicolor film processes... So the aliens would have plenty of time to prepare their understanding of color even if they haven't been able to see stuff from us in the mean time.
The problem comes later when we switch from analog to digital and the stray waves of signals drastically drop as we start to shift to systems that don't waste energy broadcasting the signals into semingly empty space so they will find us very hard to ... Well... Listen to.
Isn't the analogy TV signal actually encoded as brightness, and then a red-cyan and a yellow-blue channel?
It's not that the signal made the electron beam wobble. The TV, if it was a color model, decoded that signal and modulated the beams of three independent electron guns. These were mounted side by side (or in a triangle), but aimed the same point on a mask the screen, so that their beams would arrive at slightly different angles.The mask then allowed electrons from each gun to pass through and strike the red/green/blue phosphor dots, which were side by side (or in a triangle) on the screen.
Your uploads are so well done and thought out, they are bloody great !
Now I'm kinda wondering what the suicide numbers will be among alien scientists whose job it is to listen to Top 40 pop station all day. I'm also wondering how many will be able to sing More than Feeling beat for beat after listen to classic rock for 30 years.
Any plans to make any merchandise? I kinda want a shirt to display my love of this channel.
Hahaha XD
what surprises me is after all the Arrival and Girl's Sandwich comments not one person has referenced the 80's pop song in the episode, ah well. Yeah I suspect they'd have folks spend a lot of time on our pop music. No merchandising notions yet, maybe down the road, something for after the 100k subscriber mark.
Isaac Arthur - well, I may be late to the party, but your channel spins me right round, baby! like a record, one might say.
Ironically, they might still be "fascinated" just simply because it's not theirs and it's "different" from their norms. I mean, consider what music would have been considered "trash" amongst many of the ancient Romans and yet a modern scientist worth his salt in historical academia would be thrilled to get even a snippet of it just merely to get some data on that ancient civilization.
If an Alien can deconstruct and understand our speech from radio signals light years away then I'm sure they could do the same from a radio signal originating 4 feet away.
Bellacasi III
really? You didn't think they had a word for war??
BELLigerent
ParaBELum
BELLicose...war is literally in their name.
Doesn't bellacasi 3, when translated from Latin mean 'the third house of war' or 'the third dynasty of war'?
I wrote a novel about blind, deaf, dumb aliens who communicate by smell. Their bodies are riddled with tiny pores that emit different scents. By combining scents they have developed a complex language. They have communications systems and even computers that reproduce smells instead of audio or video.
Maybe futurama wasn't so far off with Smell-O-Vision then...
Great episode. This is one of the best so far.
I shudder at the thought of aliens drawing conclusions about humans from radio shows like Rush Limbaugh's
Ignoring the flamebait aspect of that remark, objectively speaking from an anthropological standpoint the show would be an absolute gold mine. It's the same guy discussing basically currents events and human psychology for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week for almost 30 years and being transmitted from tons and tons of different stations and transmitters mostly located in one region. That would be like coming across a thousand volume history of Cesarean Rome written by the same author, biased to his perspective but containing a damn near perfect download of life then.
It wouldn't be any worse than the image of Rome that *Secret History*, written by Procopius, gave modern civilization.
Or imagine them getting audio recordings of Hitler,
or more modern, the fat man who sounds like he has a greasy set of hamburgers stuck in his his throat and gets stupid people to buy his bogus junk... Jones or whatever.
the westboro baptist church having a propaganda sector is what i'm scared about
Funny you say that, I thought the same thing! That and Alex Jones... Ugh. Wonder what aliens would think of that.
Imagine aliens becoming human fans after listening to our signals for so long
One of the first signals they would get is Hitler's Sportspalast speech..soo uh, hope not? (There are discussions if that transmission was to weak for reaching space but idk)
Fermi Paradox theory: some the first implementations of radio was by Hitler to broadcast his speeches. The aliens know we exist but all have come to the agreement, "stay away from those humans, they ain't right in the head!"
My theory was partially joking. Secondly, I believe morality is not subjective. Thirdly, this is not a moral argument, but an argument of logic. I am sure any species that have gotten intelligent to the level can understand the concept of genocide. When viewing another civilization's radio broadcasts and for example intercepted Hitler's speeches and followed up with journalism at the time, and eventually a documentary or two on the Holocaust they can infer that at least some humans are violent, even to the point of genocide. So logically based on Hitler's speeches a civilization could come to the conclusion that making contact with or sharing technology with humans could lead to potential conflict in the future. Not a Fermi Paradox solution, because one civilization might just say, "Lets wipe them out before they are a threat." In the end my theory was just a joke in a UA-cam comments section. lol
Maitland Jones imagine the awkward moment when first contact is.made only because the aliens really liked the creative aesthetics of Nazi Germany
Maitland Jones You should watch the movie Contact! It's just about that, and if I remember correctly it went out in 1997.
Maitland Jones Radio was around for a littlenwhile before Hitler. By the time he was giving radio broadcast speeches, other people were too.
What I'm wondering is how confused aliens would be if they heard the original War of the Worlds radio broadcast.
@@MaitlandJones But what about the post WWII signals? Not exactly ideal, but they at least show there'd be humans willing to engage in talks w/o firing a shot first.
I really love that Stargate SG1 episode where the Asgard have a test in place that requires knowledge about the circle to pass. I think we could build the ultimate rosetta stone for aliens based on math and other sciences. Like define numbers by relating unary(counting, like | = 1_2 = 1_10, || = 10_2 = 2_10, and so on) to binary and decimal, define hydrogen as an atom with 1 proton and write down it's (estimated) freezing point and boiling point in Kelvin, etc... From what atoms are we can get to molecules like water, and so on.
An alien species that is picking up our early tv transmissions will have to suffer through re-runs of I Love Lucy and probably commit ritual suicide
Blasphemy!
I really do agree with you, some of our early tv shows were the best even I Love Lucy because the television and radio were the only means of information available for the average family not like today with every device you can ware or carry connected to the internet
In a nutshell, they learn structure then they learn what things mean using tv.
On screen there are objects ASBD, and there are some words, the words will be different each time and objects too, but if there's let's say a nuclear reactor, then there would always be a picture of that and with a large enough dataset, the other words and objects would turn into background noice, while that object would be consistently here.
AI'S use this from like 2014 on professional scale
And how do they will differenciate the hundreds of languagues used by each counties on earth ?
Same way, frequency analysis, including the normal kind of frequency, since a give radio frequency will mostly be using just one language.
actually - differentiating languages is reeally easy - you don't need to understand them at all - as long as you can somewhat seperate the sources you will notice that some aources use certain patterns really frequently that otheres never use at all - put an advancedcomputer to itand you have a 99.9% reliable seperat distinction of languages in minutes - although without actually understanding any of it
juste kevin They'd probably just start by learning the most prevalent and/or politically dominant language, and then we've already done all the translation work for them.
Another Friday, another fascinating video from Isaac Arthur.
If you met an alien with tentacle would you swipe left or right?
Noseface Tough call.
I'd kick low.
Obviously, succ
to all the people making fun of his speech.leave the guy alone no ones perfect.great video isaac Arthur keep up the good work
I certainly don't need subtitles.
Pretty sure if octopodes became intelligent, they would display super complex patterns on their skins.
I think visual skin patterns might be decently common for communication.
Yes, I think so, too. It can evolve from camouflage, which is really advantageous, over social signalling, just as in cephalopods, to a very complex and high-bandwidth language.
They are intelligent. #govegan
"Became" intelligent? They're already far in excess of us, they're just hiding it while they slowly take over
A wonderful video like always. Thank you Arthur to make our every Thursday more interesting!
What if the aliens speak in an encrypted dialect that doesn't know how to pronounce 'R's?
Then this is an ideal vid for them, isn't it?
The film 13th Warrior has a pretty well done sequence where Antonio Banderas' character discerns the local tongue by constant frequency analysis around the campfire, and we pick up the words as he does.
Oh no Info Wars well the aliens are gonna irradiate us because they think we are insane I don't blame them
Amazing commentary cybernet.
What could we do without your comment. Good guy. You da best. We are all now enriched for having read your words.
The Shushu King Whats the point in making things political on a channel like this
Bruter Cause, he's just a kid brainwashed into bringing politics into every online subject.
Boooo, politics? Here? C’mon man.
At least try to compose a legible sentence if you absolutely must.
Human are CRAZY CRAZY ALIENS. EXTERMINATE!!!
Isaac’s analysis made me think Stanislaus Lem’s His Master’s Voice, and Solaris , andJohn Brunner’s Total Eclipse - all tales of how understanding of aliens can evade us.
I like to imagine in a few million years that alien civilization trying to uncover humans from just our signals sees this video and understands that we knew how they had uncovered our language and culture.
Add to the complications, the different languages of radio broadcasts that they'll hear.