For decades, humans have tried to send coded messages into space in the hope of finding an intelligent extraterrestrial civilisation. However, in order to decipher and reply our messages, aliens might actually use Artificial Intelligence, in the opinion of MIT researcher Daniel Oberhaus.

According to a recent article published on International Business Times, Mr Oberhaus believes that “extraterrestrials also have a language of their own. Also, like humans, extraterrestrials are widely interested in scientific and technological discoveries such as artificial intelligence”.

Of course, extraterrestrial languages surely differ from ours, which is an issue that needs to be resolved. “Although it would be easy to assume that extraterrestrials have their own set of languages, it does not automatically mean that their language follows the same grammatical structure and hierarchy as ours”, the article says. “This means that even if stable contact has been established, misunderstandings might still happen due to the differences between the two languages”, it explains.

Nonetheless, Mr Oberhaus suggests in his book called Extraterrestrial Languages that “a comprehensive text such as an encyclopaedia” could be the solution, since “this would provide extraterrestrials with a basic idea of the words and phrases that humans use”.

Finally, in order to process the information we send them, the MIT researcher affirms that alien civilisations could use Artificial Intelligence. “The best way to communicate large amounts of information may not be painstakingly designing artificial languages from scratch, but sending a large corpus of natural language text, such as an encyclopedia”, the researcher expresses. “This is how we train natural language algorithms on Earth, which tease out the rules of human language by statistically analysing large collections of text. […] If ET has developed its own AI, it could potentially decipher the structure of a natural language message”, he asserts.

Draw your own conclusions…

For more information: https://www.ibtimes.com/alien-language-can-et-understand-human-alphabet-symbols-2864103