The following photo is of a fictitious planet created by the CGI department at Lightstorm Entertainment. It was the setting for the protagonist in a 2002 movie called Solaris. Slightly larger than Earth, approximately 98% of Solaris is immersed in blue, protoplasmic matter. Solaris is located inconveniently between two neighboring stars, possibly creating what is known as a “three-body problem,” though the respective motions of the three componets in the system were never a matter of fact or even speculation in the movie or in the novel written by Stanisław Lem. Whatever the relationship in this system, Solaris was able to stabilize itself and to fold (i.e., bend) space. That, by itself, was extraordinary. The Earth sent unmanned probes to the star, which were never heard from again. A manned expedition followed, but contact was lost with them as well. Therefore, psychiatrist Chris Kelvin was dispatched to the station “hovering” in a geosynchronous orbit above the planet to investigate what went wrong and to bring everyone home, shuttering the station in the process.
Lem wrote the novel to develop “a human encounter with something [which] cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas, or images.” The planet is alive and sentient in some startling way; it appears to be one giant organism. Rather than communicate directly with the astronauts in the station, it retrieves from their minds and then reflects back emotionally charged scenes from their earlier lives on Earth, recreating long-departed loved ones when necessary to re-entangle itself with the two remaining astronauts in the process. When Kelvin arrives, Solaris has insidiously stolen a traumatic drama from his past to replay for him, based on the suicide of his fiancée, for whom he could not or would not offer the emotional care she needed in their past relationship.
I chose to introduce the subject of Xenolinguistics (also called astrolinguistics, linguistic xenology, or various other related terms), because the field is very young and mostly confined to Hollywood, where it is applied to alien races such as the Klingons in the Star Trek franchise. However, with the release in the past decade of the “tic tac” videos and the Navy’s admission that they cannot explain what the objects were, it is logical and prudent to prepare for a “first contact” with another race, whether extraterrestrial or cryptoterrestrial, in the near (or distant) future. For help with this, researchers have turned to Hollywood for input because it is very difficult to think outside our own experiences and reality.
Yet, when you look at Hollywood portrayals of aliens, such as Ming in Flash Gordon (1936), The Martian Chronicles (1950), Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Son of the Stars featuring Clonar (1952), you are still left with bipeds. I once read that this had more to do with finding practical and functional costumes for actors to wear “back in the day” before CGI and, when special effects were difficult to produce in any convincing way. Even SETI today still has an anthropological bias.
How might intelligent crystalline1 life communicate? Or the seed pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)? What about the mysterious Heptapods in Arrival (2016)? And what about Solaris? Each example presents unique challenges.
This is the first installment in a series of essays dealing with our ability to communicate with a nonhuman species. Yet, we don’t need to consider how to exchange ideas with someone from Wolf 359 or Proxima Centauri. We have plenty of opportunities on Earth to do so with primates, pets, dolphins, corvids, and so on.
Whether a planet has carbon- or silicon-based life forms depends on the circumstances. On Earth, or a planet with Earth-like conditions, it would not be probable (see text).
But how could crystals communicate with other crystals or life forms? Possibly by vibrating, since they have no speech organs. Living crystals would likely be a form of silicon base life.
History of ET thinking and xenolinguistics
The topic of xenolinguistics actually involves some pretty forward thinking. It’s one thing to dream of planets where there might be life, even intelligent life. The Greek philosophers Democritus (460 BC–370 BC) and Epicurus (341 BC–270 BC) did so themselves. It is then understandable to wonder what these beings might look like. But to speculate on how they might communicate is much further down the list.
Lucian (125 AD–180 AD) wrote of extraterrestrials as follows:
. . . in his satirical work "A True Story," [Lucian] describes the inhabitants of the moon (sometimes called "Moonites") with a mixture of fantasy and comic absurdity. These lunar beings are all male, bald and hairless, and have only one toe per foot and a tail made of cabbage. Their eyes can be removed and stored away at will, and the wealthy keep spares. Their mucus is like honey, their sweat is milk (used for making cheese), and they carry their young in marsupial-like pouches. A unique method of reproduction is described: men act as ‘wives’ until age twenty-five, after which they become ‘husbands.’ Male pregnancy occurs in the calves of the legs, with babies born dead and revived by breathing wind into their mouths.
Francis Godwin (1562-1633). In 1638, Francis Godwin published a book called The Man in the Moone [sic}. In this book, Godwin introduces extraterrestrials that speak using musical sounds rather than the words we use. This was not particularly imaginative, but it was an important first step.
In the early nineteenth century, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed constructing immense geometrical designs on the surface of the Earth. He hoped it would attract the attention of any intelligent species that might live on the Moon or Mars.
When radio was introduced, no less a person than Nikola Tesla saw potential for using that medium to communicate with
other races. Radio telescopes quickly followed, with Russia perhaps making the first interstellar broadcast in 1962 followed by SETI and the greetings on the Voyager probes.
Xenolinguistics comes of age
In the early twenty-first century, a number of professional papers and books on the topics of astrolinguistics and zenolinguistics emerged. See the end of this post for a partial list.
Eli K. P. William, writing in Aeon (“The Grammar of a God-Ocean”), states that there are three reasons why zenolinguistics is maturing at this very moment and becoming more salient than ever before.
The first reason has to do with the Tic Tac videos and other encounters published by The New York Times, which forced the government to admit that there was something indeed very serious occurring that they could not explain. This “something” posed a possible threat to our national security, although there is no suggestion of hostility.
The second reason for the interest in Xenolinguistics according to William is the sheer number of exoplanets that are discovered each year within or without the “Goldilocks Zone.”
Thirdly, with the advent of “deep learning” or “black box learning”, it is more possible than ever to comunicate with non-human intelligence (such as pets, primates and so on).
But the Fermi Paradox seems to become more and more indicting each year that we hear nothing from “out there.” In fact, I sometimes wonder if other races are, in their own way, screaming at us, but we just don’t have the understanding to realize this. As an example, I’ve used the scenario in the past where a tree can hypothetically communicate in some way, but it takes a century to finish the message. Or, perhaps a dolphin is talking to us, but it requires weeks to complete the simplest of messages. Do we have the patience to understand what is happening?
The Arecibo transmission
In 1974, the Arecibo radio telescope sent the above 1,674-bit message to M13, a globular cluster in the constellation Hercules. Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, and several others contributed to it. From left to right, the message contains the numbers 1–10. Next are the atomic numbers of the elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which make up deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Chemical compounds in DNA follow, and then the estimated number of nucleotides in the human genome, along with the double helix structure of DNA. This is followed by a graphic of a 5’9″ human, a representation of our solar system, and the shape of the Arecibo dish. However, it makes little sense to me, and I am an earthling. How, then, can someone from Rigel understand it? What would it mean to (say) a dolphin?
And speaking of dolphins, Delphinidae have what are called “signature whistles.”
These are unique “names” that each dolphin adopts to identify itself by name to other dolphins. Not only that, but they can pass messages to other dolphins across great distances through third-party dolphins, using the other dolphin’s signature whistle as an “address.”
In addition to this, dolphins facilitate their communication with echolocation techniques and nonverbal methods, such as tail slapping.
The fictional language of the Klingons has been fleshed out over the years and through half a dozen series following the original Star Trek. In fact, the vocabulary already established among Klingon fans allows it to be used for an accurate translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (ibid, William).
Unfortunately, in spite of this, humanity still suffers from the rigid restraints of anthropomorphism when it comes to exolinguistics. It is in this regard that the book and the movie Solaris differ.
Merge and the notion of generative grammar
Generative grammar is a theory that suggests the human brain is “hardwired” with a certain set of abilities that allows it to successfully understand and synthesize any possible speech developed by others in our species. As we can read in the quote below, there is a limit to the number of rules, and these rules are likely innate (i.e., present at birth) to us rather than acquired. Furthermore, the same brain that can work within this framework will likely have trouble “thinking outside of the box” when it comes to alien languages. See here as an example.
A caveat: I am sure that my definition above is stilted and not as fluid as a linguistic major might define the term. However, for all its awkwardness, it conveys what I want it to.
A signature feature of generative grammar is the view that humans have an innate "language faculty" and that the universal principles of human language reflect intrinsic properties of this language faculty. In learning their native languages, children acquire specific rules that determine the sound and meaning of utterances in the language. These rules interact with each other in complex ways, and the entire system is learned in a relatively short time and with little or no apparent conscious effort. The most plausible explanation for the success of human language learners is that they have access to a highly restrictive set of principles which does not require (or permit) them to consider many alternatives in order to account for a particular construction, but instead limits them to a few possible rules from which a choice can be made -- if necessary, without much further evidence. Since there is no evidence that the principles that define the class of possible rules and systems of rules are learned, it is thought that these principles serve as the preconditions for language learning, forming part of the innate capacity of every normal child. Viewed in this light, the principles we are attempting to discover are part of the genetic endowment of all humans. It follows that an understanding of these principles is necessary to an understanding of the mental makeup of the human species.
For the sake of simplicity, “merge,” pioneered by Noam Chomsky, links more than one word to create an additional possibility. In that sense, 1 + 1 = 3.
Take the three words “book,” “the,” and “read.” You have a noun (book), a definite article (the), and a verb (read). Aside from the article “the,” there are two standalone possibilities. By merging the three words into a single statement (“read the book”), you create an additional possibility.
Now, if you have ever read a book or seen a movie (like Contact or Arrival) about communication with aliens, you’ll know that one of the first tasks is to create a primer or a word book with definitions. This is challenging even among us humans. For instance, how would you describe and define the color “green” to another human who sees everything in black, white, or gray? You might say that green is the opposite of red, but then how do you define or describe red in any meaningful way? “Merge” suggests that you look for syntax, such as how often a word or sound is repeated.
In graduate school, you might use a content analysis program that takes a passage, such as the Gettysburg Address or a toast to the bride and groom delivered by the Best Man at a wedding reception. It not only gives you a word count (which MS Word and other word processing programs can already do), but it also tells you how many times an individual word is used in a passage. You’ll quickly discover that the more commonly used words are conjunctions such as “but” and “so,” or articles such as “a” and “the.” Once you discover (for example) what serves as a conjunction, you can assume that the word or words immediately before and after the conjunction are somehow linked. That is not necessarily true, however, and again, this whole process up to now presumes that the rules that govern language on Earth are true elsewhere in the galaxy, and that is a big assumption. Is the engineering rule “form follows function” true only on Earth, or is it found elsewhere in the cosmos? “Merge” assumes that some civilization on a yet-to-be-discovered planet around Wolf 359 even uses words. It probably also assumes that life is carbon-based as opposed to silicon-based or boron-based. How would a boron-based or ammonia-based life form even speak?
It’s possible that communication could occur through scent. The skunk uses odors to warn off predators. Females among mammals use odor that accompanies estrus to attract males of their species.
There is a certain logic to the algorithms that teach us how aliens might communicate, but what if aliens are not even logical in any sense? A time-traveling species might not even use tenses when describing an event since past, present, and future might be the same to them (assuming they are even sexually distinct from one another).
Looking for signs of intelligence
When searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, an investigator needs to look for signs of an artifact amongst all of the ground clutter. Many researchers (including Wolfram) look for straight lines first. This is also a useful hack when searching for a crashed plane on the floor of the ocean by the way and it is one reason to discount the notion of Oumuamua and 3 I/ATLAS to be vessels because they do not appear artificial. Yet, not every lifeform would be advanced enough to create complex geometrical patterns or structures.
Technosignatures including radar and laser pulses, artificial chemicals and light on the dark side of a planet are some of the more promising expectations.
Several years ago, the alleged detection of phosphine and ammonia in the Venusian atmosphere caused a stir among scientists. The presence of PH3 on Venus absent any biologial process was thought to be highly unlikely. But the initial claims were controversial and could not be repeated. Furthermore, data processing flaws, contamination of the spectral lines produced by the instruments and other artifacts cast doubts on these initial claims.
This is a photo of the famous face on Mars. For years it fired popular thinking of the Red Planet until more powerful cameras were placed in orbit and under higher resolution, the face disappeared. Pareidolia, which is a way many people make sense out of a series of random details was blamed in part. As such, it did not meet the criteria to be an artifact. The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey did meet the criteria however, because of its cubic dimensions.
The language of mathematics
Can mathematics be used as a communication tool? Early to mid-twentieth century approaches used math to discern the general intelligence and technological prowess of a hypothetical First Contact with aliens. The first few digits of pi, for example. If one were to broadcast 3.1415 under the assumption that every civilization would have had wheels and therefore would recognize what 3.1415 is, why was that not a useful metric? But what would be the “correct” response? Certainly not 3.1415 because a parrot could do that. The correct response was thought to be 9265, which are the next four numbers, or perhaps three or five numbers instead, as long as they could compute what follows. Yet, Stephen Wolfram, who was consulted for the movie Arrival does not necessarily agree that mathematics is the way to go. “…is mathematics actually universal? Does anyone who builds spaceships necessarily have to know about prime numbers, integrals, or Fourier series? It’s certainly true that in our human development of technology, those are things we’ve needed to understand. But are there other (and perhaps better) paths to technology? I think so.”
What about telepathy?
There are people who claim to be in contact with extraterrestrials. This subset of people are designated as CE5. They are people who say they have had a Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind. A CE5 situation includes communication between a human and an extraterrestroial.
After a survey of the literature, Perplexity concluded:
From a strict scientific standpoint, no verified mechanism for telepathic communication is known, whether human or extraterrestrial. Studies simulating “alien-mediated telepathy” have demonstrated how easy it is to fabricate plausible results, revealing that scientific rigor demands controlled, repeatable data before any claim can be accepted . As such, telepathic alien contact remains a speculative concept at the intersection of neuroscience, linguistics, and astrobiology. In summary: while extraterrestrial telepathic communication is theoretically conceivable under advanced cognitive or technological conditions, it remains unverified. The idea functions primarily as a thought experiment within xenolinguistics and consciousness studies, exploring how minds unlike our own might bypass language altogether to share meaning.
The reference to “alien-mediated telepathy” referes to a 2025 stuxdy called “Unraveling the Neurological Mechanisms of Telepathic Communication: A Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Study” in the Journal “Cases.” The article claimed that when two people were paired together, that their gamma band oscillations synced together during a telepathic experiment, and the stronger the participants belief in telepathy, the stronger the bond and syncronization was. However, according to Perplexity:
The paper claimed to find that people’s brains sync up when they try to communicate telepathically, especially in belief-related brain regions — but the methodology and “alien” references make it unreliable. In reality, it’s best understood as an example of pseudoscientific publishing rather than genuine neuroscientific discovery.
A closer look at Arrival
that each of the two creatures (A and B) has a different way of communicating.
Heptapod A prefers audible communication, described as “vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur.” In fact, for the sake of the movie, the sound as it communicates is a composite of numerous animal cries that are phonetically enhanced, but in any instance impossible for humans to reproduce at all, let alone accurately.
Heptapod B chooses to write, which is preferred by the humans because they can copy the symbols and pass them around to colleagues for their input, rather than listen to a recording of gibberish that humans cannot possibly reproduce, let alone decipher.
The process of establishing communication with the aliens is pitifully slow. The fact that there are seven other ships elsewhere on the globe, including countries hostile to the U.S., makes the task of understanding who the Heptapods are and why they are here even more urgent. At the very least, we need to find out before an unfriendly country does and co-opts the visitors to their advantage.
The written communication from the Heptapods is delivered in circular logograms. There are many examples where humans who cannot understand each other resort to drawings in the sand.
The fact that the Heptapods visited earth in advancved ships made communication, difficult as it was, easier than it might otherwise have been. Some of the thirty or forty xenolinguists that write books and teach at universities today believe that an alien civilization with the technological prowess to visit earth would be easier than expected to be able to communicate with. Says Professor Jessica Coons (McGill University) a scientific advisor to the movie:
I think if aliens arrive here in spaceships, if we establish contact this way, we can be pretty darn sure that we are dealing with people who have the ability to do really complicated, abstract representations of things, the same way humans do. We don’t obviously see that in other species on the planet. It seems likely that even if their language is very different from ours, there are going to be patterns there, and there are going to be points in common just based on the fact that they arrived in some spaceship.
This has been just an introductionto the topic of xenolinguistics. I hope to include additional information on xenolinguistics in a future post. Check back often!
Footnotes
1Silicon life is not likely to exist on a planet such as earth because of our oxygen enriched atmosphere and because the copious amount of water (at least in the oceans). “Such lifeforms would probably live in environments toxic to human life. The most common otherness tropes for a silicon-based lifeform is some sort of crystaline or insectoid life, often with pronounced facets such as compound eyes.
Silicon-based worlds are expected to be hot and arid, potentially orbiting close to their stars, where high radiative flux and strong UV exposure prevail. Compound eyes, with their thousands of small lenses (ommatidia), distribute heat and light across multiple units rather than concentrating it through a single lens. This design minimizes thermal damage and maintains optical function even under intense illumination—ideal for a silicon-based organism whose mineralized or crystalline tissues would resonate or refract light differently than soft organic matter.
2Democritus thought that the universe visible to human beings was only one among countless worlds, many of which must also contain stars, planets, and living things.
3Epicurus: There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours… we must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world.” Bennett, Jeffrey O.; Shostak, Seth In letter to Herodotus (2016). Life in the Universe (4th ed.). United States: (Pearson.)
For additional reading
Basala, George Civilized Life in the Universe (2006).
Chomsky, Noam, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language (1960).
Eklund, Matti Alien Structure: Language and Reality (2024).
Freudenthal, Hans Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1 (1960).
Oberhaus, Daniel, Extraterrestrial Languages (2019).
Ollongren, Alexander, Astrolinguistics: Design of a Linguistic System for Interstellar Communication Based on Logic, (2013).
Playford, Richard ed., Exophilosophy: The Philosophical Implications of Alien Life (2024).
Vakoch, Douglas, Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language (2023).
Van Pelt, Stan. Unraveling the Neurological Mechanisms of Telepathic Communication: A Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Study (2025).
