Posts tagged aliens

In the second edition of Where is Everybody? I discuss what Gerard Foschini calls the canonical artefact (TCA) — a flag for the presence of an advanced intelligent life-form. I don’t propose to discuss the details of TCA in this post — you can read the book if you’re interested — but I do want to provide an update. I was fairly sure that no-one had constructed an example of TCA, but yesterday Foschini emailed me a photo of it: he built it out of coin stacks with black rubber test tube stoppers as separators. Below, shown with gratitude, is Foschini’s TCA.

via http://stephenwebb.info/tag/canonical-artefact/

The film turns on the visual language of the heptapods, the name given to the aliens because of their seven tentacular feet. In Chiang’s short story, the spoken language looks pretty familiar to Dr Banks; nouns have special markers, similar to the grammatical cases of Latin or German, that signify meaning; there are words, and they seem to come in particular orders depending on what their function is in the grammar of the sentence. But it is the visual language that is at the heart of the story. This language, as presented in the film, is just beautiful; the aliens squirt some kind of squid-like ink into the air which resolves holistically into a presentation of the thought they want to express. It looks like a circular whorl drawn with complex curlicues twisting off of the main circumference. The form of the language is not linear in any sense. The whorls emerge simultaneously as wholes. The orientation, shape, modulation, and direction of the tendrils that build the whorls serve to convey the meaningful connections of the parts to the whole. Multiple sentences can all be combined into more and more complex forms that, in the film, require GPS style computer analysis. The atemporality and multidimensionality of the heptapods’ written language is a core part of the plot. So, could a human language work like this, or is that just too alien?

via https://davidadger.org/2016/09/23/how-alien-can-language-be/