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 Signatures, Elliot described a software program for detecting a syntax in the string of ones and zeros that might one day wing its way to us from outer space. Elliott's work is based on the fact that all languages have patterns that can be statistically analysed. "Language has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it will be inefficient and unwieldy," he says. Dolphin, ape and bird sounds also share these patterns, though the notion of animal languages is controversial.
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