Imagine that one of these centuries we make contact within alien civilization.

It's a big cosmos with quintillions of planets, so it's bound to happen at some point.

But how the heck are we going to understand what they're saying?

How are we going to decode their language?

After all, they might not communicate with air compression waves.

Maybe they do something visual, but in ranges of light, we can't even pick up with our eyes.

We won't have a rosetta stone.

So how are we going to decipher what they are trying to say to us?

And this might seem speculative, but what I want to draw our attention to

is that we currently are in the same position right now, right here at home,

which is that we can't tell what a single one of the two million species on our planet are

saying. Not even the 6,600 species of mammals, which are presumably kind of like us. We're not

having conversations with anyone but ourselves. With all these species, I'm willing to bet you don't listen to a single podcast, not made by a human.

But today, we're going to see some hope, some pathways for how we might get to animal translation and relatively soon.

Welcome to In Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, I examine the intersection of science and our lives.

And today, we're going to talk about understanding animals.

When I was a kid, I saw some episodes of Star Trek, the original one with Kirk and Spock.

And the thing that always struck me was how every week on schedule,

they discovered new alien civilizations,

which is not so crazy, given that the universe is presumably teeming with life.

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