4.4 • 921 Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2019
⏱️ 81 minutes
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The endlessly fascinating question of whether we are alone in the universe has always been accompanied by another, more complicated one: if there is extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? In his book Extraterrestrial Languages, Daniel Oberhaus leads readers on a quest for extraterrestrial communication. Exploring Earthlings’ various attempts to reach out to non-Earthlings over the centuries, he poses some not entirely answerable questions. If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? What languages will they (and we) speak? If we can’t even communicate with dolphins and whales, which are mammals, or chimpanzees and gorillas, which are primates, how are we going to communicate with sentient beings that evolved on another planet? If we want to send a message to far-future humans to, say, warn them not to open a container of radioactive waste from a nuclear plant, what would we put on the container to communicate the danger within? Is there not only a universal grammar (as Noam Chomsky has posited), but also a grammar of the universe?
In this incredibly fascinating conversation Shermer and Oberhaus also discuss:
Daniel Oberhaus is a science and technology journalist whose work has appeared in Wired, the Atlantic, Popular Mechanics, Slate, the Baffler, Nautilus, Vice, the Awl, and other publications.
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0:00.0 | Welcome to the science salon podcast. I'm your host Michael Schurmer. If you're watching this, this is our new studio here in Santa Barbara. |
0:07.0 | Made Craft is a production company that's owned and run by my cousin Brad, so thank you Brad for hosting |
0:14.3 | us here today. My guest this week is Daniel Oberhaus, his book is |
0:19.2 | Extraterrestrial Languages. So this is about making contact with extraterrestrials either we get their |
0:25.9 | signal we send a signal how are we going to communicate with them what is |
0:29.8 | what is it just between communication and language? |
0:33.0 | Turns out to be a super huge subject. |
0:35.7 | And then the technology of how you would encode that |
0:39.5 | in some signal and send it out to space. |
0:42.0 | And this gets into the nature of evolution, the laws of physics, what our |
0:46.4 | extraterrestrial is going to be like. It's got to be constrained by the same |
0:49.7 | laws of physics we have here and presumably the same laws of biology and |
0:53.7 | evolutionary biology and so on so we get into all that all the way up to at the end |
0:58.1 | who speaks for Earth and why even if we never make contact with extraterrestials, which admittedly the chances are very low. |
1:06.8 | But that doesn't matter because really it's a way of getting us to think about our species |
1:10.9 | as a whole, our planet as a whole who speaks for our species and what it means to be |
1:17.2 | human what it means to be intelligent what it means to be able to |
1:20.0 | abstract reason abstractly and even morality which we get into at the end of our |
1:25.6 | conversation. So with that I appreciate your support for the Sign Salon |
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