AINEWS
We've Never Been Good at Talking to Whales. Why Do We Assume Aliens Would Be Easier?
Spielberg's Disclosure Day dramatizes first contact. The harder linguistic test is happening right now, in our own oceans.
Spielberg's Disclosure Day dramatizes first contact. The harder linguistic test is happening right now, in our own oceans.
If we cannot reliably decode a humpback song, an octopus gesture, or a cephalopod flash, what is the basis for assuming that we will decode an alien signal? That is the question sitting underneath the release of Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, and it is the one a working linguist wants the public to take seriously.
The film, in Spielberg's own framing from an on-mic interview, is a "human interest story" about contact, communication, and asymmetric knowledge, asking, in his words, "Why should the unknown be known by some people and not all people?" (Scientific American Science Quickly). It is a fair question, and a useful cultural peg. But the harder, more interesting question is what "communication" would actually require in a real contact scenario, and whether our existing linguistic categories are even adequate to the task.
The linguistics professor featured on the same Scientific American episode draws a sharp distinction that films tend to skip. Most cinematic alien language is built. It is constructed by writers and language designers to sound alien while still being parseable by human audiences. Klingon has a Hamlet. Na'vi was engineered with phonological rules. These are works of art, not data. They tell us about human aesthetic preferences for the strange, not about what an actual extraterrestrial communicative system would look like.
This is where the real test begins. A contact scenario would not hand us a constructed tongue. It would hand us a behavior pattern that we would have to identify as language in the first place. Math is the perennial candidate for a shared signal, and it is plausible for narrow purposes such as timing, location, or elementary physics. But math is not a language. It does not negotiate, equivocate, hedge, or imply. Human language does all of these things, and a serious encounter with a non-human intelligence would force us to decide whether the categories we use to describe our own speech actually describe the phenomenon we are pointing at.
That is the uncomfortable part. We are already running this experiment, and we are losing. Humpback whales produce structured sequences that look communicative but resist the categories human linguists use. Octopuses signal with skin patterns and posture in ways that do not map cleanly onto a phoneme or a word. Researchers applying information-theory methods to animal vocalizations have argued, in work referenced in the same Scientific American episode, that the question of whether a signal carries meaning can be approached without assuming it sounds like us. None of this has produced a Rosetta Stone. Decades of effort have produced a series of careful acknowledgments that the categories we brought to the problem may have been wrong from the start.
Disclosure Day can dramatize the moment of contact. It cannot dramatize the decades of patient, often failed, work that real contact would require, because that work looks like hesitation, re-classification, and argument among specialists, not a dramatic reveal. The film's aliens will, almost certainly, speak a language we can hear, parse, and feel something about, because that is what audiences demand. A real contact scenario is far more likely to deliver something that looks like noise for a long time, then like a pattern, then like a system, and only later, if ever, like a language we can translate.
This is the mirror the movie holds up. We keep producing fiction in which the alien is legible, and we keep failing to produce science in which the non-human right here on Earth is legible to us. The gap is not about technology. SETI has had signal-processing capability for decades. The gap is conceptual, and it is the gap a linguist would point to first: we do not yet have a settled answer to what would count as evidence of language in a system that does not share our sensors, our timescales, or our social organization.
So the question for anyone leaving the theater is not whether Disclosure Day got the alien right. It is whether we are prepared to do the slower, more honest work of recognizing communication in places we did not expect to find it, including the ocean, before we assume we will recognize it in space. The whales are still waiting on an answer. The aliens, if they exist, can wait a little longer.