SPEAKING to extraterrestrials is probably the alien hunter’s ultimate dream but first we have to understand what they’re actually saying. A good place to start would be recognising that an extraterrestrial signal will probably be made up of words and sentences.
John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, has done just that by devising ways to decipher the structure of an alien tongue. For him, the vast differences between us and an alien intelligence do not necessarily preclude the notion that alien languages might have a recognisable grammatical structure. Last month in Paris at a conference on Searching for Life…
