Hello, SFIA audio listeners, in this month's Nebula exclusive, Big Alien Theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

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In Douglas-Am's famous hitchhiker's guide to Galaxy series, we are introduced to the

Babelfish, a little fish you could put in your ear that instantly lets you understand any language

you heard.

Sadly, the poor babelfish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between

different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in

the history of creation.

So today we'll be looking at alien languages, what strange forms they might take and

how we might go about decoding and

translating them. Those are hard enough when we consider them in the context of classical

sci-fi and SETI, where we assumed humanoid aliens are speaking to us intentionally,

sending us radio signals we are technically capable of receiving and intellectually capable

of understanding, but these things are likely to be much harder in reality.

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, comes in a lot of forms, but the most

well known is listening for radio signals that look like clear signs of communication,

or at least signs of transmissions by intelligent life.

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