Language finds a way
my name is hannah
and i’m a lecturer in science
communication and that’s all about
teaching scientists and science
communication students how to
communicate
about science and technology and the
related concepts
um to put different publics who might
know less about those things
um but my background’s actually in
linguistics
and studying language and my phd was
actually about evolutionary linguistics
and thinking about how
um our human ancestors uh went from a
stage
when they didn’t have language um to a
stage
where they do have language right and
those kind of subjects seem
uh not people kind of struggle to see
how they’re related or how i kind of
went from one to the other but i think
this one key concept
um that really links them quite well and
that concept
is the concept of shared knowledge
um so to explain shared knowledge um i
usually like to use the example
of ted danson this is because one time i
did a talk
and somebody reviewed the talk and said
there was way more ted danson in it than
than he was expecting there to be and
that’s created this expectation
that ted dunstan has to be in every
single talk i give
but ted dunstan he’s just he’s a
friendly guy he likes to talk to people
he likes to have a chat
um but it’s easier for ted danson to
talk to some people
than to other people and the easiest
person for ted danson to have a
conversation with
uh is himself because he speaks the same
language as himself
he has exactly the same cultural
background as himself
and has exactly the same overlapping
knowledge as himself
and so it’s almost as if he doesn’t even
need to open his mouth to have that
conversation
right he is himself but if ted dunson
was to instead
go on a little world tour if he came to
newcastle
had a conversation with me um he’d
probably be quite um
successful in communicating with me we
both share the same language we both
speak
english but in order to have that
conversation
he has to make all sorts of assumptions
about what i know
and what references i’ll get um we have
a bit of a generational
difference and also a little bit of a
cultural difference
i live in the uk he lives in america
right so there might be some things
topics that he might avoid because he
thinks i won’t get it
and that’s fine but instead then if he
went to um somewhere
like japan and went and spoke to one of
the locals
who doesn’t necessarily speak english um
he would have a much more difficult time
having that conversation right because
he doesn’t have a shared
language um so then he needs to start
thinking about what his shared knowledge
is
in order to start trying to communicate
with
a specific person right and he might do
that by using kind of
a global conventions that human have
humans have he might start pointing to
things or gesturing things that he knows
that we have in common
it’s quite easy to kind of gesture
things like emotions because we know
that
all humans share emotions so you can
gesture laughing you can gesture crying
and people will get that let’s now
imagine instead that ted danson goes on
holiday to mars
and starts to try and have conversations
uh with aliens
all aliens come to earth and start
trying to have a conversation
with ted danson right this creates a
much more difficult problem
because not only did they not share a
shared
cultural background or a shared
knowledge but they also don’t have a
shared language or even a shared notion
of what language
might be and that’s why aliens come into
earth is
a lot more kind of comparable when we in
terms of situation where we think about
the the the problem that our ancestors
had to overcome
when they were kind of negotiating um
the first human
um language type communication systems
right there was no
existing notion of what language was or
what it looked like right
it’s very similar to the to the the
problem that they try and uh
solve in the film arrival um has anybody
seen a rival
yeah i have an arrival tattoo if anybody
wants to see it in the interval
um but so for the benefit of the people
in the room who haven’t seen
a rival and for the entertainment of
those who have i’m gonna um
enact a small scene from the beginning
of the film um
so the self is that aliens have landed
on earth um
that’s in the trailer so it’s not a
spoiler and amy
adams uh plays a linguistics professor
and she’s sat in her office
watching the news because aliens have
landed and who wouldn’t be watching the
news in that instance
and this helicopter lands outside um
and it’s forest whitaker uh who plays an
army general
and he comes charging at the off uh amy
adams’s office
um and and has this tape recorder and
puts the tape recorder down
and says um i need uh you to do a
translation for me
presses the play button on the the the
recorder
and there’s this sound that comes out of
this recorder which is it sounds a
little bit like this it goes
uh and and amy i’m just like oh my god
is that the
aliens and and forrest whitaker’s like
yeah
can you translate it i’m glad you’re
laughing right
because this is actually what happens in
the film and everybody’s like yeah okay
but it is ridiculous
and naomi is like no matt i don’t speak
alien
um and the first work is like uh
yeah but can you hear any phrases can
you hear any words and she’s like
no i don’t speak alien
um like you just you’ve got a recording
here but i’m not aware of the context in
which
the aliens are making these noises i’m
not aware of the environment
um i’m not able to interact with them
you know you’re making a huge assumption
here that it the aliens are even
communicating using
uh the medium of sound right which is an
enormous assumption
and forest whitaker is like oh you were
really good at translating the farsi
that i brought you before
and jeremy adams is like i already spoke
farsi
this is a really really difficult
problem i need to be in front of the
aliens right in order to do this
and for the rest of the film like she
does that she gets taken to the aliens
and
she has this very long negotiation to
kind of work out a communication system
that they can share
but i think that this really really
highlights how difficult this problem is
um how difficult the problem of trying
to communicate when you have very very
little
in terms of shared knowledge and in
terms of
um a shared language it’s really really
difficult
when you’re talking to aliens it’s
really really difficult um
when your our human ancestor negotiates
a language and it’s also um difficult
for science communicators
trying to communicate with people about
science when they’ve been thinking about
something really really really specific
for a long time and a completely lost
um track of kind of what normal people
know right
so this is why everything’s kind of
connected um
and uh this notion of communicating to
aliens i mean it rivals fiction right
aliens haven’t actually landed on earth
but um
humans have in reality um previously um
tried to communicate
with aliens so this um object here is
known as the golden record
um so the golden record was a plaque
that they mounted
on the voyager space probe and people
sometimes get this confused
with the plaques that they put on the
pioneer
space probes the plaques on the pioneer
space robes had um two
naked humans on them a man and a woman
the the golden record
came three years after um those ones um
and the reason why there’s no naked
humans on this one
is because a lot of people rang nasa and
complained that we were sending nudes
into space
um i guess assuming that like aliens
have the same kind of
cultural hang-ups about our naked bodies
as we do
um but
so yeah so when carl sagan came to
design the golden record like nasa
literally
wouldn’t let him put naked humans on
because of the kind of
public backlash that they got after the
um
after the pioneer ones so the thing
about these space probes is that we sent
them
all the way out to the very very edges
of our solar system
and and they were communicating with us
the whole time and sending pictures back
um if anybody’s seen the pill blue dot
picture of earth from
you know uh really far away
that’s uh where that picture comes from
but all of these space probes have now
left the solar system they’ve gone
beyond the solar system
we’ve lost communication with them um we
don’t know where they are anymore and
the idea is that in about
a thousand million years and we’ll all
be dead
probably um aliens might come across one
of these space probes
um and try and work out what these
strange symbols mean right
and be like oh um you know there right
there is intelligent life out there
and we found evidence of it because
these are clearly communicative
images um and sounds because it’s also a
record
even though the the golden record
doesn’t have nudes on it and one thing
there’s two things that it does have on
it that it shares with the pioneer
plaque so there’s two things on this
image that are also on the pioneer
plaques one of them is this little guy
in the bottom right sorry i don’t have a
laser of the west side point to it but
these two little circle things
um and they represent the um two states
of
of hydrogen and the reason why that’s on
there
is because hydrogen is the most abundant
chemical
um uh the most abundant element in the
universe right so it’s likely that if
there is intelligent life out there
um they’ve probably worked out that
hydrogen exists because there’s so much
of it all over the universe right
so this is a really really good thing to
try and communicate because we know that
it shared knowledge
between us and between the aliens right
um so it’s like
just a kind of indicator to say yet
we’re aware that this exists
um so you know that we are also
intelligent life forms trying to have
this conversation with you the other
thing that is shared between
both um the the pioneer plaques and the
voyager
golden record is um the big spiky thing
which is on the on the bottom left and
that is a pulsar map
um of where our solar system is in
relationship to
um all of the different pulsar stars
that we’ve detected
right so it’s basically a map to say
where we are
in the universe has anybody ever kind of
downloaded an app on their phone and the
app has asked
are you okay with sharing your location
data with me
and every now and then at least i do
pause and think i don’t know if i am
okay with you knowing my location there
but some guys including carl sagan back
in the 1970s
um all sat down and made this decision
on behalf of all of humanity
that in thousands of millions of years
um
some aliens are gonna find this plaque
um
and and they’re gonna know exactly where
we are in the universe
and they haven’t ticked the consent box
for that
and i’m not sure i’m okay with that
there’s nothing i can do about it now
um i’m not sure i’m okay with that um
especially
because like three years earlier uh we
sent them our nudes
yeah so i think that um this is a really
really nice example of why share
knowledge is so important when we don’t
have
a shared language um and i also think
it’s an absolute
successful bits of science communication
that’s happened in the past
uh few decades it inspired a whole
generation to really think really really
deeply about some of these topics
and so this is one of my favorite
objects but yeah that’s why
aliens language and science
communication are all connected
thank you