Research network to search for extraterrestrial intelligence launched in U.K.
the Universe.”
Dr. John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University is a researcher on the nature of communication: how language structure can be identified, and methods for subsequent decipherment and dissemination. He has analyzed over sixty human languages, which cover all the different types of systems, as well as non-human communication, such as robots and dolphins. Elliot believes that by understanding our analytical capabilities for communication, we can develop strategies for extra-terrestrial message discovery and understanding.
“Suppose SETI succeeds and we detect a technological beacon. Any message is unlikely to be written in Martian English, so standard decipherment/decryption techniques used by the military and security agencies are not going to help much. To put the challenge into context, we still have scripts from antiquity that have remained undeciphered over hundreds of years, despite many serious attempts,” said Elliott.
Elliott’s research focuses on whether there is something unique to communication phenomena, irrespective of the source, that makes them distinguishable from other signals in the universe.
“By looking beneath the surface veneer of the arbitrary sounds and symbols used, we can ‘see’ the language machine itself: its mechanisms, constraints, and evolutionary forces of efficiency and compromise that shape it. By understanding these structures, it should be possible to glean information on the intelligence of the message author,” said Elliott.
The release notes that back in 1950 during a conversation on SETI, the physicist, Enrico Fermi, posed the question ‘Where is everybody?’ The paradox between the high estimates for the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of contact or evidence remains a key area of SETI research. Dr. Anders Sandberg, of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, is investigating the question of how far away in space and time a civilization could start and still have a chance of interacting with Earth today.
“If this were a very limited range, the Fermi question, ‘Where are they?’ would be easy to answer: they couldn’t have got here yet. However, we show in our paper that, beyond a certain technological level, civilizations can spread not just across their own galaxy but across enormous intergalactic distances. This is mostly limited by how fast their devices are and the expansion of the universe.
There are millions or billions of galaxies from which a civilization could have reached us, if it were established early,” said Sandberg.
Sandberg and his colleagues have concluded that the answer to the Fermi question is
