Talking to aliens would put us in our place, scientists say

BBC film explores possibility of speaking with extraterrestrial life

HUMANS trying to talk to aliens would be like ants attempting to communicate with people, astronomers believe.

Scientists have said in a BBC film that if we were to come into contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, we would likely be mentally inferior.

They added that maths is the likely common ground through which the two worlds would converse.

Our solar system is relatively young by celestial standards at just 4.5 billion years old, while the universe is almost 14 billion years old.

Therefore, an alien civilisation would probably be older than us, with evolution potentially driving their cognitive skills far beyond our own.

The feature-length drama documentary First Contact: An Alien Encounter investigates what may happen if we do find evidence of aliens. The show posits a hypothetical situation where an alien signal has been picked up coming from a moving object which can be traced back to a distant star.

But when it comes to trying to talk back, there are bigger issues than just a language barrier.

Prof Michael Garrett, director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, said: “We have got this thing in our head that is limited by the physical scale of it but there might be other things out there that have a capacity that is completely beyond what we can even imagine. It’s a bit like ants trying to communicate with humans.”

Dr Louisa Preston, an astrobiologist at University College London, told The Daily Telegraph: “I bet we are like ants. We have really inflated egos about our ability to think.

“If you think about 13.8 billion years compared to our 4.5 billion years, the chances are we are the ants.”

While scientists think an alien species would be able to outwit us, how they would look is a mystery.

The show proposes that if we detect signals of extraterrestrial life or spot an alien spaceship, the chances are the creators of the signal are already long extinct, making the hunt for alien life “celestial archaeology”.

“Searching for life in our solar system is one thing, but searching for life beyond might be closer to archaeology because we are receiving signals from dead civilisations,” said Dr Hakeen Oluseyi, an astrophysicist at George Mason University.

Dr Jill Tarter, chair emeritus at the SETI Institute, compared it to a relationship with Shakespeare, the Ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire, where “we can’t ask questions of them, but they have provided a wealth of information”.

“It might be that we find the relics of that civilisation because their technology can last much longer than their biology can,” Dr Preston told The Telegraph. First Contact: An Alien Encounter airs on Nov 2 on BBC Two.

‘We have really inflated egos about our ability to think’