Communication With An Alien Race

[phillip1882]

imagine you've been abducted by a race of beings who have interstellar travel, but no knowledge of English, or any earth language, or customs, or writing, or so on.

your job is to communicate with them.

with you, you have a laptop, but no internet.

where would you start? how would you describe earth?

 

for me, the most obvious place to start would be numbers. if i can't communicate that idea, then no communication is possible. 

 

i'd start by placing a single dot on the screen of a paint program, say the number one, draw the symbol for 1, and point to the number 1 on the keyboard. then do the same basic thing for 2 - 100.

by then they should understand our numbers. then i'd introduce operations. addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponentiation, and logarithms. then i'd do some basic geometry, such as drawing a circle, saying circle, drawing a triangle, saying triangle. and so on. then, presuming they followed all that, it's time to introduce the manner in which earth measures things. this would be tougher. i would say the word centimeter, hold my finger up to the screen, and draw a line roughly a centimeter long. then say "100 times centimeter equals meter." then say "1000 times meter equals kilometer." then, for time say "6000 kilometers radius of earth, light can travel around earth 16 times in one second. 60 seconds in one minute, 60 minutes in one hour, 24 hours in one day the time it takes earth to revolve round it's axis, 365 days in one year the time it takes earth to revolve around our star." then for temperature, i'd lay out the periodic table of elements. say the word for each element, and then use the Celsius scale, explaining that H20 freezes at 0 and steams at 100. finally for mass, i'd set up a balance scale, use something small and call that gram, and 1000 grams = kilogram. then with that backbone, i can begin to explain the alphabet, and from there some basic English words, and so on. thoughts? improvements?

[CraigD]

imagine you've been abducted by a race of beings who have interstellar travel, but no knowledge of English, or any earth language, or customs, or writing, or so on.

your job is to communicate with them.

...

for me, the most obvious place to start would be numbers. if i can't communicate that idea, then no communication is possible.

... thoughts? improvements?

Your approach seems good to me, though I think the specific arithmetic, geometry, and unit conventions is less important than demonstrating how you use language and writing – in this case, using a laptop computer.

 

Your scenario specified that my captors know nothing of Earth culture, but if they know so little that they don’t know I’m a reasoning, language-using animal, my first priority would be to give evidence of this. I’d be very concerned with the fact that they abducted me, because if they have a culture much similar to mine, and consider such an abduction to be legal, they likely consider me to be less than a citizen of that culture, and may feel entitled to not only kidnap me, but kill me and study my cadaver. Convincing them not to would be my immediate priority.

 

Because, if I’m successful in this first goal, I expect I’d be more likely to use their symbolic language (including mathematical) than mine, I’d focus on learning it, not teaching them mine. My immediate goal would be to learn as much about their laws and traditions relevant to my immediate survival and well-being. What is their government – or lack of one – like? Should I appeal to their equivalent of a human-rights court, an agency for the prevention of cruelty to animals, attempt to find and place myself in the service and under the protection of a powerful, high-status individual? Prove my worth with a display of bravery via a challenge to single ritual combat?

 

Foremost, I’d try to be observant and flexible in my approach, avoiding risks to this due to planning too much in advance.

 

I’d hope my captors weren’t so profoundly alien that none of my goals were achievable.

 

Although it describes an abduction of someone by less alien people – a 9th century human by 21st+ century humans, via a time machine – this alien abduction scenario reminds me of Piers Anthony’s 1976 novel Steppe. I’d hope to do as well as the protagonist in that story.

[pgrmdave]

Your scenario specified that my captors know nothing of Earth culture, but if they know so little that they don’t know I’m a reasoning, language-using animal, my first priority would be to give evidence of this. I’d be very concerned with the fact that they abducted me, because if they have a culture much similar to mine, and consider such an abduction to be legal, they likely consider me to be less than a citizen of that culture, and may feel entitled to not only kidnap me, but kill me and study my cadaver. Convincing them not to would be my immediate priority.

I'm trying to think of it this way - if a group of people trapped and captured a new fish (that happened to be intelligent) how would it convince us that it was intelligent? First of all, it's important to note that if a group captures something like that, they're unlikely to kill it (on purpose). So what could the fish do to convince us? I think the best thing it could do would be to mimic our motions. If we observe the fish observing us, that would be a pretty clear indication. If it seemed to watch us, follow us (with its head/eyes) around the lab. To move its fins in an unnatural way to try to mimic what we were doing would *definitely* make us stop and try to figure something out. Once the fish had established that it could observe us, and wanted to observe us, then we would try to see how smart it was, how observant it was. Whether or not it knew what it was doing or if it was just an automatic response, etc.

 

So if I were to be abducted by aliens who truly knew nothing of me, not even that I *could* communicate, the first thing I would do would be to conspicuously observe them.

[Moontanman]

I'm trying to think of it this way - if a group of people trapped and captured a new fish (that happened to be intelligent) how would it convince us that it was intelligent? First of all, it's important to note that if a group captures something like that, they're unlikely to kill it (on purpose). So what could the fish do to convince us? I think the best thing it could do would be to mimic our motions. If we observe the fish observing us, that would be a pretty clear indication. If it seemed to watch us, follow us (with its head/eyes) around the lab. To move its fins in an unnatural way to try to mimic what we were doing would *definitely* make us stop and try to figure something out. Once the fish had established that it could observe us, and wanted to observe us, then we would try to see how smart it was, how observant it was. Whether or not it knew what it was doing or if it was just an automatic response, etc.

 

So if I were to be abducted by aliens who truly knew nothing of me, not even that I *could* communicate, the first thing I would do would be to conspicuously observe them.

 

Wearing artificial coverings ie clothing would be a pretty good indicator, if you were nude you might end up rolled in corn meal...