Some­where out in space there are oth­ers. Intel­li­gent life-forms. Beings from another planet. I’m con­viced of it. Con­sid­er­ing that our galaxy con­tains roughly 200 to 400 bil­lion stars and that there is an esti­mated amount of galax­ies equal to the amount of stars in our Milky Way – well, there must be aliens out there. It’s unthink­able that we’re the only ones in this vast uni­verse. More­over, think­ing this way shows an arro­gance and igno­rance that is sim­ply unimaginable.

I don’t think aliens have to look like us. They can, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily have to. It’s obvi­ous that given the same con­di­tions we have on Earth they may look like us but in the end, that doesn’t really mat­ter. Even a slight aber­ra­tion in our evo­lu­tion could change their shapes result­ing in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent form. What really mat­ters is that we’re able to com­mu­ni­cate with each other. Every intel­li­gent life-form will even­tu­ally come to develop ways of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on a larger scale. Radio sig­nals it is I’m talk­ing about.

Earth is like a giant bea­con in our galaxy, send­ing sig­nals to outta space since the inven­tion – or shall we call it the dis­cov­ery – of radio sig­nals and our using them. Every pos­si­bly exist­ing civ­i­liza­tion a few light years away could receive parts of these sig­nals enabling them to draw con­clu­sions on us humans. Of course, they should be able to decode our “mes­sages” to do so. How­ever, math is the way to talk to aliens because it’s uni­ver­sal. I’m sure, pos­si­ble vis­i­tors won’t speak any lan­guage we know on Earth. If they still speak at all.

A great philoso­pher once said that “there is no greater illu­sion than the notion that lan­guage is a means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between humans.” and I’m inclined to think so too. Just remem­ber how many times you wanted to express some­thing absolutely clear to you but your con­ver­sa­tional part­ner still shakes his head after the third expla­na­tion. Or when you say some­thing that is under­stood quite dif­fer­ently than was intended. Every­thing depends on inter­pre­ta­tion and con­text. Besides, lan­guages change with time. Sci­en­tific for­mu­las are revised from time to time but uni­ver­sal laws of physics, dis­cov­ered by obser­va­tion, stay the same.

Well, I won­der if I live to see humankind suc­cess­fully estab­lish­ing con­tact with extrater­res­trial life-forms. I’d really like to see if that kind of expe­ri­ence will change the way humans per­ceive each other. A rev­e­la­tion on this scale could change every­thing, cre­at­ing the world we see in Star Trek. Even if I can’t pos­si­bly imag­ine such a thing to hap­pen it is still nice to think of it. This would be an utopia I’d love to live in …