If the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is successful, we may require the help of artificial intelligence to understand what the aliens are saying and, perhaps, talk back to them.
This is where we will need AI's help, but to understand how, first we must delve into the details behind the structure of language.When we talk about a signal or a message being complex, we don't mean that the aliens will necessarily be talking about complex matters. Rather, it refers to the complexity underlying the structure of their message, their language.
A transmission of the digits of pi, for instance, would now carry a –1 slope.
One way is listening to recordings of the various whistles and barks that make up the dolphins' own communication. In particular, a machine-learning algorithm is able to take a snippet of dolphin chat and break that communication down into discrete units on a spectrogram , just as Shannon and Zipf described, and then it labels each unique unit with a letter.
That little difference could be because it incorporates a dolphin's signature whistle or because the context is different. Linguists have been studying dolphin communication for decades, and this research could be a good analogue for communicating with aliens.This is exactly the way that AI would begin analyzing a real message embedded within a SETI signal. If the alien communication is more complex in structure and syntax than human languages then that tells us something about them; perhaps that their species is older than our own, which has given them enough time for their communication to evolve.