You have already performed the greatest feat of your life, although you most likely are unaware of it. This is the acquisition of your native language. Within the first few years of your life, you went from nothing to a fully competent speaker of the language(s) you were exposed to. That happens unconsciously, without any instruction,1 in a very short time, with native-speaker competence as the result.

Would the same hold for exobeings? Indeed, would it be valid to assume that exobeings have a division of their lifespans into childhood and adulthood as with humans? Recall that for Darwinian evolution to occur there must be some way for an organism to reproduce and be gradually subject to natural selection. If sexual reproduction applied in the animal world of an exoplanet, reaching sexual maturity would be a feature of animal life.

The long pathway from simple cells to intelligent beings, capable of developing digital technology, will have been traversed on any planet with such beings. So it makes sense to consider how the development panned out on Earth. Up to about seven million years ago (7 mya), about 99.85 per cent of the age of our planet, there were no animals walking the Earth which looked like us. Yes, there was great biodiversity on land and in the sea. But there were no species which were in any way capable of reflecting on the larger world in which they lived, beyond their own environment, let alone reflecting on Earth as a planet and its admittedly very modest role in the cosmic scheme of things. If any exobeings had by chance taken a closer look at our planet, they would not have been motivated to investigate it in any detail.

Linguistics is the study of the human language faculty and the languages it engenders. It enjoys interfaces with other sciences such as cognitive psychology, neurobiology and physiology. The borders between linguistics and other sciences are fluid and have shifted with increasing research in the field. Where we draw the lines is a matter of debate among scientists, but we do draw them because science compartmentalises reality for the purpose of inquiry and analysis.1

For some two centuries linguistics has been an established branch of science, and considerable strides have been made in researching how humans speak, how they acquire their native language and in documenting the known languages of the world. This knowledge has been arrived at by devising means for analysing human language and by adopting approaches based on notions which are likely to be quite different from the views which non-linguists will have about the subject.

We know that life has arisen at least once in our universe. This simple fact testifies to an extraordinary feature of the building blocks of the universe – subatomic particles, atoms and molecules – the ability to aggregate to form immensely complex entities, which display a vast array of emergent structural properties. One of the pinnacles of this potential (on Earth) is the human brain, with the consciousness it engenders (see Chapter 17 for a detailed discussion).

When examining the building blocks of the early universe there is no indication whatsoever that these elements – initially hydrogen with some helium – would ever give rise to beings capable of reflecting on the nature of the universe and mulling over its origin and possible future. It would seem that all one needs are suitable conditions and enough time.

As exobeings can only arise through evolution the roots of their sociality would lie in earlier stages of their biological development. From Earth, we know that animals bond and form communities in different ways, with the common purpose being the survival of the species. This is the basis of their very divergent kinds of behaviour. There is no reason why this should not be the case on an exoplanet as well.

Animals differ widely in the extent to which they interact with each other. Some animals, like certain types of birds, such as albatrosses, remain together as couples to rear their young and return to each other every year; others do not, with the male leaving once mating has occurred.

The considerations in this book have been largely about the nature of human life and language with a view to assessing (i) what exolife forms and exolanguages might be like and (ii) the chances of our communicating successfully with such exobeings, should we ever come into contact with them. Let us remind ourselves of four general preconditions for beings on an exoplanet in order for them to be capable of engaging in such communication.

How do you write a book about things, life and language on planets outside our own Solar System, when you do not even know if they exist or not? The only sensible answer is by looking at how life developed on Earth1 and then considering how this could manifest itself on exoplanets, those beyond the planets which orbit our star, the Sun. This is because when considering possible Earth-like planets (see Section 8.8 for 10 criteria) we have, at our present state of knowledge, a set consisting of only one member, our Earth; this is the ‘set of one’ issue (Figure 1.1).

In order to speculate sensibly about what an exolanguage might be like, it is necessary to take a closer look at language on Earth in a number of separate but related steps.

On our Earth the dividing line between animals and humans is determined by the ability to speak. Assuming that evolution is the only manner by which complex biological structures can arise in our universe, the exobeings of any exoplanet must also have arisen through an essentially similar process of evolution as we humans have.

Language separates us from the rest of the animal world1 and makes us what we are, beings who live in intricate social networks, with considerable cognitive powers and the ability to convey knowledge from one generation to the next and thus build up vast bodies of knowledge which extend far beyond what a single individual could achieve in a lifetime. All this is possible because we can formulate our thoughts in language which others can then understand and engage in exchanges.

Stars form when vast clouds of gas and dust begin to swirl and collapse with a concentration of matter at the centre. Around the newly born star a proto-planetary disk rotates, out of which planets can later evolve by clumps arising and accumulating ever greater amounts of material. The smaller planets which arise tend to be largely composed of rock, like the first four in our Solar System, whereas the larger ones tend to be gas or ice giants, like the outer four in our system.