Life and Language Beyond Earth

Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland and former Professor at the University of Duisburg and Essen, Germany. His main research interests are varieties of English, language contact, variation and change and issues in phonology. Some of his recent publications include Listening to the Past (2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (2017), English in Multilingual South Africa (2020) and The Handbook of Language Contact (2020).

Have you ever wondered whether we are alone in the universe, or if life forms on other planets might exist? If they do exist, how might their languages have evolved? Could we ever understand them, and indeed learn to communicate with them? This highly original, thought-provoking book takes us on a fascinating journey over billions of years, from the formation of galaxies and solar systems, to the appearance of planets in the habitable zones of their parent stars, and then to how biology and, ultimately, human life arose on our own planet. It delves into how our brains and our language developed, in order to explore the likelihood of communication beyond Earth and whether it would evolve along similar lines. In the process, fascinating insights from the fields of astronomy, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neuroscience and linguistics are uncovered, shedding new light on life as we know it on Earth, and beyond.

Could we communicate with lifeforms on exoplanets? This thought-provoking book explores the likelihood of life and language beyond Earth.

How to use this book; Part I. Introduction: 1. Approaching the topic; 2. Looking beyond Earth; 3. Striving to understand; Part II. The Universe We Live In: 4. Trying to grasp size; 5. Star formation and planets; 6. The likelihood of life; 7. Possible conditions on an exoplanet?; 8. How and where to look for exolife; 9. The limits of exploration; 10. Assessing probabilities; Part III. Our Story on Earth: 11. The slow path of evolution; 12. How does the whole work?; 13. The road to Homo sapiens; 14. The rise of human societies; Part IV. The Runaway Brain: 15. The brain-to-body ratio; 16. How brains develop; 17. Our cognition; 18. Consciousness; 19. Artificial intelligence; Part V. Language, our Greatest Gift: 20. Looking at language; 21. Talking about language; 22. The view from linguistics; 23. The language faculty and languages; 24. Language and the brain; 25. Acquiring language; 26. Humans and animals; Part VI. Life and Language, Here and Beyond: 27. Preconditions for life; 28. What might exolife be like?; 29. Looking for signs of life; 30. The issue of first contact; 31. Language beyond Earth; 32. How human language arose; 33. The language of exobeings; 34. Looking forward: the basic questions again; 35. Some final thoughts; Appendixes; Glossaries; Timelines.