If you were an alien giving a press conference, what would you say?

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Vlürch
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If you were an alien giving a press conference, what would you say?

Post by Vlürch »

I know this is a kind of weird question and this may be the wrong subforum for it, but this article made me think of how an advanced alien species could come to Earth and communicate with humans. So, naturally, I thought: if I was an alien and came to Earth, what would I do? Well, I'd hold a press conference of some sort, which would logically be at the UN with all national heads of state and more present. It would be broadcast to everyone on the planet. Now, the question would of course be what such an alien would say. The first words would have a great impact on human future and become a historical moment remembered for generations to come.

What would you say?

I'd probably say [ɗ̼͡r̼ɶ̰t̪͡ʪ̪ʷʼ ʛ͡ʀr̼̍ʶːq͡χˠˤʼɚ̃] regardless of whether it meant anything in the alien language simply to troll humanity. I mean, it'd be hilarious; people are expecting something profound that they could understand (since clearly the alien could communicate prior to this with the world leaders so that the whole thing could be set up), only to get literal gibberish that they couldn't even repeat (but which wouldn't be technically impossible for a human to produce). After that, of course, there'd be a long dramatic pause and then something actually deep in English or Mandarin or whatever would be the global lingua franca at the time... but that's not what this thread is about; it's all about the phonetic stuff, the first impression mankind would get of alien speech.

(For the purposes of this thread, let's assume that regardless of what the aliens would be like biologically and whatnot, they could somehow produce human speech; it could be by physically altering their vocal cords or by telepathically connecting to a human who then speaks, etc. but that's not relevant.)
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Lambuzhao
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Re: If you were an alien giving a press conference, what would you say?

Post by Lambuzhao »

I do not think E.T.s would broadcast a message in one of their langs. I think they would try to make sure they were understood in one of Humanity's langs, one of the 'noisiest' from radio/tv/ and Intertoobs. Now, what that would sound like, out of their snergellers, would interesting to hear.

The ET-Civ in question's possession and usufruct of the technology to come to us would presume that they've had some time to study us, unless they were either in a rush due to trouble/problems (a la District Nine), not caring due to a schedule (a la the Vogons in THG2TG) , or simply were bent on wiping us out (War of the Worlds -style).

I would be interested to hear what such ETs under duress would come up with as an attempt to communicate with us. Would it be a conjumblement of
English, Chinese and other 'noisy' Eartherlangs, in some sort of linguistic equivalent of a ransom note? Of course, in those scenarios, they'd be forced to use their own lang, or simply not bother to learn any of ours.

Perhaps they'd use a language they'd brushed up to the last time they were in our neck of the woods, say, Proto-Basque, Harappan, or Middle Chinese or some other Eartherlang which was majoritarian, but in an elder time. (Absolutely NOT like what happened in Prometheus, where the Engineers spoke Proto-Indo-European b/c the Engineers invented Proto-Indo-European ~ Yuck!).

I'm sure pictograms of some sort would be involved. Not those weird inky calamari-rings like what the Heptapods made in Arrival, though.
Prolly something along the lines of messages that would come at us not unlike what recently-developed 'dream-recorders' have done to 'translate' dreams into visual texts by comparing novel brainwave patterns to recorded stimuli from viewing hundreds of Google images and Youtube short viddies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-F4B_SGoJo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paOJWSnRwJE

This is more like the 'how' it would be said, not the 'what'.

What would I tell Humanity?

"Congratulations! We have come to serve mankind" [}:D] [:P]
"Live Long and Prosper" :wat:
"All Your Base are belong to Us" [>:)]
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