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281 What if there is no language lesson? Language can be detected within signals, argued John Elliott and Eric Atwell of Leeds University, even if we cannot read it. They proposed that we respond to an alien message with one of our own that describes us in one of our own languages. The other civilization would recognize the message as language even if they did not understand the content. However, true communication may require a shared code book." Biological differences may affect our ability to understand alien com- munications. Human brains seem to have an innate system of grammatical rules that structures all our languages.'* The brains of extraterrestrials who emerged from separate evolutions are unlikely to be organized the same way. Philosopher and political theorist John Locke had foreseen in 1689 that our capacity for attaining ideas is limited by our senses; beings on other worlds, assisted by “senses more or perfecter than we have,” may develop ideas unavailable to us. Differences in sensory equipment could give aliens a range of sensations totally unexperienced by humans, proposed Ruse; we may have sensations unexperienced by them." Sagan admitted that it is only a message intended specifically for emerg- ing technical civilizations that we have any good chance of receiving, let alone understanding. With billions of years of independent biological and social evolution, the thought processes and habits of any two communities must differ greatly; electromagnetic communication of programmed learn- ing between two such societies could be a very difficult undertaking. Drake recognized that we may not be able to communicate with extra- errestrials, even if we are able to detect them. In Stanislav Lem’s novel Solaris, humans and a planetary intelligence try to converse with each other, but in vain; their minds and their methods of communication are oo different.’ Perhaps the more advanced sender, aware of the inherent limitations of developing cultures, will compose messages on many intellectual planes. However, our best hope may be to seek out or eavesdrop on civilizations hat employ styles of linguistic expression like ours.'® That may imply soci- eties whose levels of scientific and technological achievement are not very ar ahead of our own. McConnell introduced another dimension: incompleteness. Even under optimal conditions, the listener will not receive the coded message with 00% accuracy. There is a high probability that the signal will be inter- rupted and that it will be vulnerable to interference, noise, or loss of line of sight between transmitter and receiver. It is extremely unlikely that the istener will intercept this message just as it is beginning; it will not be immediately obvious where the message begins and ends."” What if advanced extraterrestrials have gone through more evolutionary steps, leading to cyborgs and machine intelligence? We might find our- selves communicating with nonbiological beings. If we detected incoming The Message Will Be Comprehensible