"Are we alone in the universe? New space observatory to search for Earth-like planets."
Johns Hopkins joins NASA and other academic, government, and industry experts to build the Habitable Worlds Observatory, dubbed a “super Hubble,” to search for other life in the cosmos.
Recall my prior post on Exoplanetary Life.
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Let me go back 50 years.
Other Senses, Other Worlds
CH 8: Other Ways of Telling
WHETHER WE ARE scientists or lay people, when we think of the possibility of contact with intelligent creatures from another world, one of our first thoughts is: How shall we understand their language? How will they understand ours?
It goes without saying that the modality of expression does not have to be, and rarely is, the same as the modalities of perception. While we human beings perceive the world via sight, hearing, smell, sound, and so on, we communicate with the world vocally. We use many kinds of nonverbal communication also, as do all animals, but our deliberate or voluntary expression is via spoken language.
For this reason—and perhaps also because so many other species also use various kinds of vocal expression—we come to think of it as almost a prerequisite for communication. We usually find an unexpressed assumption that another intelligent being, no matter how totally different its form may be from ours, will express itself vocally, as we do.
This assumption has no merit. Human beings came to the ability to use speech and language because a previously four-legged creature began to run and then to walk on two of its legs only and eventually assumed a completely upright posture. This fortuitous development, causing a rearrangement of the structure of the vocal organs in relationship to each other, became the means by which the production of far more, and more complex, sounds became physically possible. Without the change of posture no change in mental development, of itself, could have produced the complexities of human speech.
Why should we suppose that this happenstance, coinciding as it did with other circumstances that favored brain development (the use of the freed hands and eventual increase in brain volume) to produce the highly refined vocal communication of speech, should also occur in another intelligent organism, formed by an entirely different set of circumstances? In our own world the means of communication are varied beyond belief. Each creature gains from its environment the information it needs and has a means of utilizing that knowledge and conveying whatever information is necessary to further its own purposes.
Almost every one of the senses through which various creatures receive news of their world is also, with modulation, a possible channel for sending out information—for communication. To offer what is to us an exotic example, a creature that receives information via sense organs that monitor infrared radiation might also be able to send messages by giving off heat in varying degrees, or pulses, allowing for sufficient modulation to be useful for communication. All one needs for a symbolic language similar to our own is a system of from fifteen to thirty distinguishable elements in whatever modality, recognizable by touch, smell, electricity, or any other means, that can be arranged in various permutations, as can the letters of our alphabet.
As rich in possibilities for communication as any of the sense modalities may be, however, we wish to elaborate here on a means of communication that is far simpler, and that is grossly underrated by most of us. It is the language of gesture and posture.
On earth such communication systems are highly evolved in monkeys and apes, and form the basis of their capacity to express motivation in individuals and to facilitate social relationships. Without this ability to express mood, monkeys and apes would not be able to engage in the subtle and complicated social interactivities that are a feature of their adaptation.
The fact that for long years human language was considered to be the sine qua non of intelligence, proved to be a handicap when scientific attempts were first made at interspecies communication, especially with chimpanzees. (Advanced work on interspecies communication has also been undertaken with dolphins.) Chimpanzees do have a vocabulary of vocal expressions, and it was probably this that misled early researchers into thinking it might be possible to teach them the sounds and meanings of human speech…
This book was published in 1976. I read a "new release" hardbound copy I'd checked out from my local library. It went out of print in 1989 when the publisher (Stein & Day of NY) BK'd and went out of business. I bought my own hardcopy. You can still find used paper copies on the 'net via 3rd parties, but there are not many. That's a shame.
I have managed to put together my own complete PDF copy of the Jonas' book, inclusive of the sourcing. I am as yet unable to locate the authors or their estate--assuming that the copyright reverted to them in the wake of Stein & Day's 1989 bankruptcy. I would offer them a copyright license deal to re-publish the book as at least an eBook. It has really aged welll overall. We'll see.
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