How Would We Even Make First Contact With Aliens?

How Would We Even Make First Contact With Aliens?

Video: There are aliens out there (and if there aren’t any, it’s just more fun to believe that there are). But if they are out there, how do we find them? Once we find them, how do we contact them? And once we contact them, how do we actually communicate with them?

Wendover Productions made this captivating video that gives some ideas on how to find aliens (look at the stars) and what contacting them would mean (contact between different civilisations is historically, um, not good). But the video actually gets even more interesting when it takes a deeper look into our understanding of how our world works and how our languages work.

Figuring out how to contact aliens is a helluva brain exercise. The languages we speak on Earth all follow roughly the same rules no matter the language (noun and verb structure, word frequency and so on), but it might be silly to assume that aliens can understand our concept of language, since other animals on this planet already communicate differently (colour, pheromones and so on) And even if we could somehow figure out an alien language (like in Arrival), it’s hard to know what their words actually mean, because straight translations of foreign languages don’t always tell the full story without an understanding of their context. It’s hard to communicate without any sort of common ground.

Wendover Productions says maybe we should communicate with maths, since maths is universal as one plus one will always equal two. Establishing that we know maths can help us reach some sort of understanding with them but there’s still just so much more to figure out. Watch the video below to find out more.


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