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from Part VI - Life and Language, Here and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2023
Would exobeings have language? The answer to this question without a doubt is: ‘Yes’. They would have language in the sense of a powerful and flexible means of communicating thoughts and ideas between individuals. Why? Complex societies arise through continual differentiated interaction among their members. While many non-human animals do live in communities whose members engage in considerable interaction this does not reach anything like the level characteristic of humans. Furthermore, no beings can acquire all the knowledge of a complex society from scratch on their own. Each generation of a society builds on existing knowledge, which is transferred from generation to generation by being documented using language. To build a technologically advanced society, language would need to be documented in some fixed form, which on Earth means using one of the many writing systems, captured physically, usually on paper, or digitally as bits and bytes in computer storage.
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