To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness
要真正探索外星语言，语言学家必须最大程度地开放自己，接受宇宙间的异质性

In the late 1620s, nearly two centuries before Mary Shelley helped establish the genre of science fiction with her landmark novel Frankenstein (1818), an English bishop named Francis Godwin wrote a speculative tale about beings living on another world. Titled The Man in the Moone (1638), Godwin’s story is significant not only as a work of proto-sci-fi, but also because it contains perhaps the earliest mention of an extraterrestrial language. ‘The difficulty of that language is not to be conceived,’ the narrator complains when initially sojourning in the utopian society of the Lunars, ‘because it consists not so much of words and letters, as of tunes and uncouth sounds, that no letters can express.’ Rather than imagining a language like those he was familiar with, Godwin dreamed of something deeply perplexing: a musical tongue sung-spoken by Moon-dwellers. ‘This is a great mystery,’ the narrator reflects, and worth ‘searching after’.
在 17 世纪 20 年代末，早在玛丽·雪莱凭借其开创性的小说《弗兰肯斯坦》（1818 年）奠定科幻小说这一体裁近两个世纪之前，一位名叫弗朗西斯·戈德温的英国主教写了一篇关于另一个世界生物的推测故事。该故事名为《月球上的人》（1638 年），戈德温的作品不仅作为原始科幻作品具有重要意义，还因为它可能包含了最早提及外星语言的记载。叙述者在最初寄居于月球人乌托邦社会时抱怨道：“那种语言的难度是难以想象的，因为它不仅仅由单词和字母组成，而是由曲调和奇异的声音构成，任何字母都无法表达。”戈德温没有想象一种他熟悉的语言，而是梦想了一种极其复杂的语言：由月球居民用歌唱和说话结合的音乐语言。叙述者反思道：“这是一个巨大的谜团”，值得“去探索”。

And then, in the 19th century, the boundaries between storytelling and science began to blur. Originally conceived in fiction, the idea of extraterrestrial language and the quest to understand it were adopted by scientists. The first serious proposal for communicating with aliens came in 1820, as a wave of industrialisation swept through Europe. Generally attributed to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, the plan involved ‘drawing’ a colossal mathematical diagram on the surface of Earth: a Pythagorean theorem illustrated through pine trees and wheat fields stretching hundreds of kilometres. Gauss hoped the diagram would be so large that it could be seen by inhabitants of the Moon or Mars.
随后，在 19 世纪，讲故事与科学之间的界限开始模糊。最初源于小说的外星语言及其理解的探索，被科学家们采纳。首次严肃提出与外星人交流的方案出现在 1820 年，当时欧洲正经历一波工业化浪潮。该计划通常归功于数学家卡尔·弗里德里希·高斯，内容是在地球表面“绘制”一个巨大的数学图案：通过松树和麦田展示毕达哥拉斯定理，图案延伸数百公里。高斯希望这个图案足够巨大，以至于月球或火星上的居民都能看到。

In the centuries since, science and science fiction have interrogated the notion of extraterrestrial language in tandem, spawning a tangled web of theories and stories, theories about stories, stories about theories, and theories about theories in stories (such as this essay), while prompting many further attempts to communicate with alien beings. This historical interplay has recently culminated in a new wave of interest in the study of alien language, a field known as xenolinguistics (and sometimes exolinguistics or astrolinguistics). But rather than aligning with sci-fi, this aspiring science marks a break with its past. In the process of gaining recognition, xenolinguistics appears to be moving away from the tradition that enabled it.
在随后的几个世纪里，科学与科幻共同探讨了外星语言的概念，催生出错综复杂的理论与故事网络——关于故事的理论、关于理论的故事，以及故事中关于理论的理论（例如本文），同时激发了许多与外星生命沟通的尝试。这段历史性的互动最近引发了对外星语言研究的新一波兴趣，这一领域被称为异星语言学（有时也称为外星语言学或天体语言学）。但与科幻保持一致不同，这门新兴科学标志着与其过去的决裂。在获得认可的过程中，异星语言学似乎正逐渐远离促成其诞生的传统。

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?
问题在于，外星语言学家声称寻找的外星生命，往往被想象成拥有与我们类似的技术、思维或语言的存在。他们实际上是我们自身的投射。这种拟人化的倾向可能使我们忽视那些真正异质的交流者——那些与我们截然不同的生命。如果在诸如 TOI-700 d 或开普勒-186f 等行星，或银河系其他地方存在语言生命体，他们的交流方式可能对我们完全不可理解。那么，外星语言学如何面对其想象力的不足呢？

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.
也许可以通过重新回归其推测性的起源来实现。通过科幻小说特有的思维方式，外星语言学这门科学或许能够学会向各种可能的异质性敞开，甚至包括那些与我们唯一共有的只是宇宙的生命体的可能性。

The modern project to communicate with extraterrestrials begins with Gauss’s colossal diagram and the various schemes that his idea inspired in the latter half of the 19th century. Such proposals to signal aliens included: igniting kerosene poured into enormous ditches shaped like geometric figures, burning messages into the deserts of Mars and Venus with a giant mirror that focused sunlight, and flashing Morse code with electric lights. By the end of the century, European excitement about the possibility of communing with our solar-system neighbours had reached fever pitch. In 1900, the Prix Pierre Guzman, a prize of 100,000 francs administered by the Académie des sciences in Paris, was offered to whoever could first ping the inhabitants of another celestial body (except for Mars, which was deemed too easy).
现代与外星生命沟通的项目始于高斯的巨大示意图及其思想在 19 世纪后半叶激发的各种方案。这些向外星人发送信号的提议包括：点燃倒入巨大几何形状沟渠中的煤油，用聚光巨镜在火星和金星的沙漠中烧制信息，以及用电灯闪烁摩尔斯电码。到了 19 世纪末，欧洲对与太阳系邻居交流的可能性兴奋达到了顶点。1900 年，巴黎科学院设立了皮埃尔·古兹曼奖（Prix Pierre Guzman），奖金 10 万法郎，奖励首个成功向其他天体（火星除外，因被认为太简单）发送信号的人。

Around this time, the radio wave became a more feasible medium for off-world communication. In 1901, after earlier experiments, the inventor Guglielmo Marconi transmitted a signal (the Morse code for the letter ‘S’) across the Atlantic Ocean. That same year, his rival inventor Nikola Tesla raved about receiving a radio signal from Mars – a claim dismissed by many of his fellow scientists, despite excitement in the press. However, as telecommunications technology progressed in the 20th century, governments and institutions began to take the sending and receiving of extraterrestrial messages more seriously, and even provided funding for such projects.
大约在此时，电波成为了更可行的星际通信媒介。1901 年，在早期实验之后，发明家古列尔莫·马可尼成功跨越大西洋发送了一个信号（摩尔斯电码字母“S”）。同年，他的竞争对手发明家尼古拉·特斯拉声称接收到来自火星的无线电信号——尽管这一说法被许多科学家驳斥，但媒体对此表现出极大兴趣。然而，随着 20 世纪电信技术的发展，政府和机构开始更加认真地对待外星信息的发送与接收，甚至为此类项目提供资金支持。

In 1962, the Yevpatoria radio telescope in Crimea aimed a high-frequency transmission at Venus. These Morse-code messages consisted of just three Russian words: ‘Lenin’, ‘CCCP’ (the Cyrillic for USSR), and ‘mir’ (meaning either ‘world’ or ‘peace’). In 1974, American researchers aimed a message from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico at the M13 cluster of stars, some 25,000 light-years away. The transmission was overseen by the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, who had previously designed the first interstellar physical messages: a pair of identical metal plaques engraved with symbols and diagrams, which were placed aboard the spacecraft Pioneers 10 and 11 launched in 1972 and ’73. Since then, multiple attempts have been made to contact aliens.
1962 年，克里米亚的叶夫帕托里亚射电望远镜向金星发射了高频信号。这些摩尔斯电码信息仅包含三个俄语单词：“列宁”、“СССР”（苏联的西里尔字母缩写）和“мир”（意为“世界”或“和平”）。1974 年，美国研究人员利用波多黎各的阿雷西博射电望远镜向距离约 2.5 万光年的 M13 星团发送了一条信息。此次传输由天文学家卡尔·萨根和弗兰克·德雷克监督，他们此前设计了首批星际物理信息：一对刻有符号和图解的金属牌，分别搭载于 1972 年和 1973 年发射的先锋 10 号和 11 号飞船上。从那时起，人类多次尝试与外星生命取得联系。

Three cultural shifts help to explain why xenolinguistics is gaining legitimacy
三种文化转变有助于解释为何异星语言学正逐渐获得认可

In recent decades, centuries after Godwin conceived of linguistic aliens and Gauss made moves to communicate with them, xenolinguistics has finally begun to gain its footing as a legitimate scientific discipline. Rather than being pushed to the fringes for its historical association with science fiction, it is being accepted by mainstream institutions, as demonstrated by the release of an unprecedented number of books on the topic by esteemed academic publishers.
近几十年来，距戈德温提出外星语言学概念和高斯尝试与外星生命交流已有数百年，外星语言学终于开始站稳脚跟，成为一门正统的科学学科。它不再因与科幻小说的历史关联而被边缘化，而是被主流机构所接受，这一点从知名学术出版社前所未有地大量出版相关书籍中可见一斑。

In 2012, Springer put out Astrolinguistics, in which the computer scientist Alexander Ollongren updates the earlier Lingua Cosmica (or Lincos) system for designing interstellar messages using formal logic. By the end of the decade, MIT Press had published Extraterrestrial Languages (2019), a nonfiction survey of the field by the science writer Daniel Oberhaus. In 2023, Routledge followed with an anthology of research papers on the topic, Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language, featuring a paper co-written by Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics. This was followed by the philosopher Matti Eklund’s Alien Structure: Language and Reality (2024), a monograph from Oxford University Press that emerged out of a xenolinguistics research group at Uppsala University in Sweden.
2012 年，Springer 出版了《天体语言学》，计算机科学家亚历山大·奥隆格伦在书中更新了早期用于设计星际信息的形式逻辑系统 Lingua Cosmica（或称 Lincos）。到了十年末，麻省理工学院出版社出版了《外星语言》（2019），这是科学作家丹尼尔·奥伯豪斯对该领域的非虚构综述。2023 年，Routledge 推出了关于该主题的论文集《异星语言学：迈向外星语言科学》，其中收录了现代语言学之父诺姆·乔姆斯基合著的一篇论文。随后，牛津大学出版社出版了哲学家马蒂·埃克伦德的专著《异星结构：语言与现实》（2024），该书源自瑞典乌普萨拉大学的一个异星语言学研究小组。

Three cultural shifts help to explain why xenolinguistics is gaining legitimacy. The first is the release by the US government of videos showing unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the coverage of these by mainstream news outlets in 2020. The second is the rapid progress of astronomy in the 21st century, with hundreds of new exoplanets discovered each year and increasingly sophisticated methods for modelling their composition. If any one UAP were proven to be extraterrestrial in origin, or an exoplanet were to display signatures of life or technology, we would have potential evidence of aliens with whom we might hope to communicate. The third cultural shift is the equally rapid progress in machine learning. This raises the possibility of one day conversing with a sentient artificial intelligence (itself a kind of theoretical ‘alien’) and has already sparked renewed efforts to crack animal communication, especially that of cetaceans, birds and primates. Successful communication with a nonhuman terrestrial interlocutor, whether artificial or biological, would add prima facie plausibility to the existence of linguistic minds elsewhere in the galaxy.
有三种文化变迁有助于解释为何异星语言学正逐渐获得认可。首先是美国政府在 2020 年公布了不明飞行现象（UAP）的视频，并由主流新闻媒体进行了报道。其次是 21 世纪天文学的快速进展，每年发现数百颗新的系外行星，并且对其成分的建模方法日益复杂。如果有任何一个 UAP 被证实具有外星起源，或者某颗系外行星显示出生命或技术的特征，我们就可能获得与外星生命交流的潜在证据。第三个文化变迁是机器学习的同样迅速的发展。这带来了未来有朝一日与具备感知能力的人工智能（本质上是一种理论上的“外星人”）对话的可能性，并已激发了破解动物交流的重新努力，尤其是鲸类、鸟类和灵长类动物的交流。成功与非人类地球对话者——无论是人工的还是生物的——进行交流，将为银河系中存在语言思维的可能性提供初步的合理性支持。

Such developments have synergised during the past decade to make xenolinguistics appear more viable and attractive. But critical difficulties remain: not only do we lack evidence for linguistic aliens, but there is little reason to anticipate that we will remedy this any time soon.
在过去的十年里，这些发展相互促进，使异星语言学看起来更具可行性和吸引力。但关键的困难依然存在：我们不仅缺乏外星语言的证据，而且几乎没有理由指望我们能在短期内解决这一问题。

The most credible attempts to find proof of linguistic aliens have been associated with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI movement has been active since 1960, wielding arrays of radio and optical telescopes to scan the skies for thousands upon thousands of hours in a wide range of frequencies, and utilising a significant amount of computing power to parse those readings. It has yet to detect a single beacon (aside from the fleeting ‘Wow! signal’ of 1977, which failed to meet the fundamental scientific criterion of repeatability). Likewise, our surveys of other planets and asteroids have not discovered even one primitive microbe originating outside Earth. Our evidence for linguistic aliens is nil.
迄今为止，最具可信度的寻找语言外星人证据的尝试都与 SETI（搜寻地外文明计划）有关。自 1960 年以来，SETI 运动一直活跃，利用阵列射电和光学望远镜，在广泛的频率范围内对天空进行了数千小时的扫描，并运用大量计算能力解析这些数据。然而，它尚未探测到任何信号（除了 1977 年短暂出现的“哇！”信号，但该信号未能满足科学上最基本的可重复性标准）。同样，我们对其他行星和小行星的探测也未发现任何来自地球外的原始微生物。我们关于语言外星人的证据为零。

The increasing institutional acceptance of xenolinguistics, therefore, must rest upon the expectation that we will, at some point in the future, receive an extraterrestrial message. However, experts have challenged this expectation since SETI’s outset.
因此，异星语言学日益被机构接受，必须基于这样一种预期：未来某个时刻，我们将收到来自外星的讯息。然而，自 SETI 项目启动以来，专家们一直对这一预期提出质疑。

In Civilized Life in the Universe (2006), the science historian George Basalla points out that the project of listening for alien transmissions implicitly assumes that there are an adequate number of nearby extraterrestrials using radio technology similar to ours. The development of radio telescopes requires a technological civilisation with science much like ours, which likely requires beings whose cognitive and cultural makeup closely mirrors our own. That is, SETI implies a galaxy full of anthropomorphic (if not necessarily humanoid) aliens. The galaxy would need to be ‘full’ because, as Drake tried to quantify with his eponymous equation in 1961, the density of aliens in our neighbourhood of the Milky Way would have to be sufficiently high for their signals to have a reasonable chance of reaching us.
在《宇宙中的文明生活》（2006）一书中，科学史学家乔治·巴萨拉指出，监听外星信号的项目隐含假设：附近有足够数量的外星文明使用与我们类似的无线电技术。无线电望远镜的发展需要一个拥有与我们相似科学技术的文明，这很可能意味着这些生命体的认知和文化结构与我们极为相似。换言之，SETI 暗示银河系中充满了类人形（即使不一定是类人的）外星人。银河系必须“充满”这些生命体，因为正如德雷克在 1961 年用其同名方程试图量化的那样，我们银河系邻近区域的外星人密度必须足够高，才能使他们的信号有合理的机会传达到我们这里。

Decades of failure have not budged SETI’s ongoing commitment to the search for anthropomorphic extraterrestrials
数十年的失败并未动摇 SETI 持续寻找类人形外星人的决心。

Evolutionary biologists, such as Ernst Mayr, have challenged the idea of a universe full of anthropomorphic aliens on the grounds that evolution is based upon too many haphazard occurrences for doppelgänger species to emerge around other stars. For example, if an asteroid hadn’t wiped out the dinosaurs, mammals would not have become dominant, and Homo sapiens would never have evolved. Even on planets identical to Earth in all relevant respects, which must be vanishingly rare, the exact concatenation of pressures across scales of geological time that give rise to an organism’s specific traits, including the capacity for technology and language in our case, cannot reasonably be expected to be repeated.
进化生物学家如恩斯特·迈尔则质疑宇宙中充满类人形外星人的观点，理由是进化基于太多偶然事件，不可能在其他恒星周围出现“复制品”物种。例如，如果小行星没有灭绝恐龙，哺乳动物就不会成为主导，人类也不会进化。即使在所有相关条件都与地球相同的行星上——这类行星必然极其罕见——在地质时间尺度上导致某一生物特定特征（包括我们所具备的技术和语言能力）形成的确切压力组合，也不可能合理地被重复出现。

Every day that we fail to detect alien signals is further support for such criticisms and gives more reason to doubt that off-world signals are on their way to Earth. And yet, for SETI, decades of failure have not budged its ongoing commitment to the search for anthropomorphic extraterrestrials.
我们每一天未能探测到外星信号，都进一步支持了这些批评，并且更加令人怀疑来自外太空的信号是否真的正朝地球传来。然而，对于 SETI 来说，数十年的失败并未动摇其持续寻找类人外星生命的决心。

There seems to be an element of metaphysical superstition to this perseverance. Basalla has noted the continuity of ancient religious cosmologies of superior beings from the heavens, such as angels or saints, with the thinking of SETI evangelists. Consider Drake, who wrote publicly about his belief that aliens were immortals destined to share the secret of eternal life with us, or Sagan, who unflaggingly promoted his faith in hyper-advanced but benevolent civilisations bound to save humankind from follies such as nuclear war.
这种坚持似乎带有某种形而上学的迷信色彩。Basalla 指出，古代宗教中关于来自天界的至高存在（如天使或圣人）的宇宙观，与 SETI 福音传教士的思维存在连续性。试想 Drake，他公开表达过自己相信外星人是不朽者，注定要与我们分享永生的秘密；又如 Sagan，他始终不懈地宣扬自己对高度先进且仁慈文明的信仰，坚信这些文明必将拯救人类免于核战争等愚行。

An effort is currently afoot to rebrand SETI as the search for technosignatures – meaning evidence of technology (and, by extension, the life form that created it). Since the technologies sought are those used now or predicted to be used by humans, this emerging subfield of astrobiology is likely afflicted with the very same anthropomorphic bias as the old version of SETI. Be that as it may, evidence of extraterrestrial technology is not ipso facto evidence of alien language. Only a verified alien message would count as such evidence. Therefore, message-hunting SETI remains the key to justifying the pursuit of xenolinguistics as a traditional empirical science, and the problems that afflict the former remain problems for the latter.
目前正有一股力量试图将 SETI 重新定位为对“技术特征”的搜寻——即寻找技术的证据（进而推断创造该技术的生命形式）。由于所寻找的技术是人类当前使用或预测将使用的技术，这一新兴的天体生物学子领域很可能与旧版 SETI 存在同样的人类中心主义偏见。尽管如此，外星技术的证据并不等同于外星语言的证据。只有经过验证的外星信息才能算作此类证据。因此，寻找信息的 SETI 仍然是将异语言学作为传统经验科学进行追求的关键，而困扰前者的问题同样困扰后者。

When it comes to conceiving of communicative extraterrestrials, xenolinguistics appears to be on shaky ground. Science fiction hasn’t fared much better. In the rare cases where authors have taken the problem of alien languages seriously, the potential for genuine insight has usually been hindered by a tendency to anthropomorphise – much like SETI. However, there are a small but growing number of stories that succeed in carrying our mind beyond this bias and on toward visions of ultimate otherness. Could these imaginative interventions help rehabilitate the aspiring science of alien language?
在构想具有交流能力的外星生命时，异语言学似乎立足不稳。科幻作品的表现也不尽如人意。在极少数认真对待外星语言问题的作品中，真正洞见的潜力通常被拟人化倾向所阻碍——这与 SETI 如出一辙。然而，越来越多的故事成功地将我们的思维超越这种偏见，引向对终极他者的想象。这样的想象性介入能否助力重塑这门有志于研究外星语言的科学？

Although The Man in the Moone seems to contain the first mention of extraterrestrial language – in science fiction or anywhere – the first technical description of such a language is likely that found in Across the Zodiac (1880), a novel by the political writer and historian Percy Greg. The ‘Martial language’ he describes is optimised for easy memorisation, with ‘no exceptions or irregularities’ and words built systematically from a small number of roots. This initial effort anticipated the production of imagined languages – what the fantasy author and philologist J R R Tolkien dubbed ‘glossopoeia’ – that would preoccupy many sci-fi authors in the 20th century. These linguistic experiments have taken myriad forms, from the communication innovation that shapes a planetary-scale revolution in Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao (1958) to the feminist Láadan language featured in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). With the possible exception of Tolkien’s Elvish, the most famous language constructed for fiction (or ‘conlang’) is Klingon, the speech of its eponymous alien race in the Star Trek franchise. The grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation of Klingon are sufficiently well developed for some hardcore fans to have become fluent speakers, while the script has been used to translate such ancient classics as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
虽然《月球上的人》似乎包含了对外星语言的首次提及——无论是在科幻小说中还是其他任何地方——但对这种语言的首次技术性描述很可能出现在政治作家兼历史学家珀西·格雷格的小说《穿越黄道带》（1880 年）中。他所描述的“火星语言”经过优化，便于记忆，“没有例外或不规则”，词汇系统地由少量词根构成。这一最初的尝试预示了想象语言的诞生——奇幻作家兼语言学家 J·R·R·托尔金称之为“造语术”——这成为 20 世纪许多科幻作家的关注焦点。这些语言实验形式多样，从杰克·范斯的《保卫之语》（1958 年）中塑造的推动行星级革命的交流创新，到苏泽特·海登·埃尔金的《母语》（1984 年）中体现的女性主义拉丹语。除托尔金的精灵语外，最著名的虚构语言（或“构造语言”）是《星际迷航》系列中同名外星种族的克林贡语。克林贡语的语法、词汇和发音发展得足够完善，一些铁杆粉丝甚至能流利使用，而其文字系统也被用来翻译《吉尔伽美什史诗》和孙子的《孙子兵法》等古代经典。

However, these meticulous explorations of alien language are the exception. As many commentators have noted, beginning with the literature scholar Walter E Meyers in Aliens and Linguists (1980), science-fiction stories have tended to give the topic of linguistics short shrift, especially in comparison with the attention paid to details of ‘hard’ sciences like physics or engineering. If the problem of alien communication is raised at all, any difficulty or strangeness is often rendered human and familiar. This is achieved through several strategies: the convenient device of telepathy, found frequently in golden-age pulp magazines of the mid-20th century; the easy postulation of a galactic lingua franca such as Galactic Basic (ie, English) in the Star Wars franchise; or by technological fiat, as with machines that easily translate between any language in the cosmos, including the universal translator in Star Trek, the TARDIS in Doctor Who, the Babel fish in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), and droids such as C-3PO in Star Wars.
然而，这些对外星语言的细致探讨只是例外。正如许多评论家所指出的，最早由文学学者沃尔特·E·迈耶斯在《外星人与语言学家》（1980）中提出，科幻小说往往对语言学话题轻描淡写，尤其是与对“硬”科学如物理或工程细节的关注相比。如果外星交流的问题被提及，任何困难或陌生感通常都会被人性化和熟悉化。这通过几种策略实现：20 世纪中叶黄金时代通俗杂志中常见的方便装置——心灵感应；《星球大战》系列中轻易假设的银河通用语，如银河基本语（即英语）；或者通过技术手段，如能够轻松翻译宇宙中任何语言的机器，包括《星际迷航》中的通用翻译器、《神秘博士》中的 TARDIS、《银河系漫游指南》（1979）中的巴别鱼，以及《星球大战》中的机器人 C-3PO。

There is a strand of sci-fi that has succeeded in carrying its speculations toward the pole of incommunicability
有一种科幻类型成功地将其猜想推向了无法沟通的极端

Even stories that make more sincere efforts to exclude anthropomorphism from their treatment of alien language can still succumb to it. Klingon is the most sophisticated embodiment of this tendency. Though it has linguistic features uncommon to most languages, including distinct grammatical patterns and complex stacks of suffixes, it is still the language of an imagined humanoid race. Furthermore, it’s a language that is spoken by humans. Klingon’s capacity to be used by us is a strike against its realisation of genuine difference.
即使是那些更真诚地努力排除对外星语言拟人化处理的故事，也仍可能陷入这种倾向。克林贡语是这种倾向最复杂的体现。尽管它具有大多数语言中少见的语言特征，包括独特的语法模式和复杂的后缀叠加，但它仍然是一个想象中的类人种族的语言。此外，这还是一种由人类使用的语言。克林贡语能够被我们使用，这本身就削弱了它体现真正差异的可能性。

These and other examples demonstrate science fiction’s bad habit of projecting human qualities onto alien language, cognition and culture. Thankfully, there is a strand of the genre that has succeeded in carrying its speculations in the opposite direction, toward the mystic and mystifying pole of incommunicability.
这些以及其他例子展示了科幻小说将人类特质投射到外星语言、认知和文化上的坏习惯。幸运的是，这一类型中存在一条脉络，成功地将其推测引向了相反的方向——通向神秘且难以沟通的极端。

In her debut novel Rocannon’s World (1966), Ursula K Le Guin imagines a race of semi-telepathic dwarven aliens called the Fiia who use no proper names for things even within their local landscape. In one passage, the human protagonist Rocannon interrogates his Fiia companion Kyo about this perplexing linguistic quirk:
在她的处女作《罗坎农的世界》（1966）中，厄休拉·K·勒古恩想象了一个半心灵感应的矮人外星种族——菲亚族，他们甚至在本地环境中也不使用事物的专有名称。在一段描写中，人类主角罗坎农质问他的菲亚同伴凯欧，关于这一令人费解的语言怪癖：

‘At each village here I ask what are those western mountains called, the range that towers over their lives from birth to death, and they say, “Those are mountains, Olhor.”’
“在这里的每个村庄，我都会问那些西边的山叫什么名字，那座从他们出生到死亡一直耸立在他们生活之上的山脉，他们都会说，‘那就是山，奥尔霍尔。’”

‘So they are,’ said Kyo.
“确实如此，”Kyo 说道。

‘But there are other mountains – the lower range to the east, along this same valley! How do you know one range from another, one being from another, without names?’
“但还有其他山脉——就在这条山谷的东侧较低的山脉！没有名字，你怎么区分一座山脉和另一座山脉，一种存在和另一种存在呢？”

Clasping his knees, the Fian gazed at the sunset peaks burning high in the west. After a while Rocannon realised that he was not going to answer.
Fian 抱膝凝视着西边燃烧着的落日山峰。过了一会儿，Rocannon 意识到他不会回答。

Ultimately, Rocannon’s question is met with silence, gesturing to the barrier of ineffability between the two species. In other stories, this barrier can be broken but only through a profound transformation of the mind, as with the written language of the seven-limbed Heptapods in Ted Chiang’s novella ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998), adapted into the film Arrival (2016). The protagonist, a professional linguist, gradually learns that the Heptapods’ ideogram-like script is not broken into sequential units such as morphemes or words, but written as a holistic semantic gestalt in which the whole and the parts are grasped simultaneously. ‘There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected,’ the protagonist realises, ‘no “train of thought” moving along a particular route.’ Learning to read and write like a Heptapod ultimately requires her to upend her temporal perception, experiencing ‘past and future all at once’.
最终，Rocannon 的问题得到了沉默的回应，暗示了两种物种之间难以言说的屏障。在其他故事中，这道屏障可以被打破，但只能通过心灵的深刻转变，比如 Ted Chiang 的中篇小说《你一生的故事》（1998 年）中七肢 Heptapods 的书写语言，该小说被改编成电影《降临》（2016 年）。主人公是一位职业语言学家，逐渐了解到 Heptapods 那类似意符的文字并非分解为形态素或单词等顺序单元，而是以整体语义格式书写，整体与部分同时被理解。“命题之间的连接方式中没有固有的方向，”主人公意识到，“没有沿着特定路径移动的‘思维列车’。”学会像 Heptapod 那样读写，最终要求她颠覆自己的时间感知，体验“过去和未来同时存在”。

In Solaris, the behaviour of its titular planetary ocean defies all notions of sentience, understanding and even life
在《索拉里斯》中，其同名行星海洋的行为颠覆了所有关于感知、理解甚至生命的概念

However, the transformation of an individual mind is not always enough. Sometimes, a more drastic reshaping of both the self and the other is demanded. In China Miéville’s novel Embassytown (2011), the Ariekei (known as Hosts) speak a language in which paired expressions must be uttered simultaneously by two voices operated by a single mind. This requires human visitors to genetically engineer twin interpreters ‘with unified minds’.
然而，单个心灵的转变并不总是足够的。有时，需要对自我与他者进行更为彻底的重塑。在中国·米维尔（China Miéville）的小说《大使城》（Embassytown，2011）中，阿里凯族（Ariekei，称为“宿主”）使用一种语言，其中成对的表达必须由两个声音同时发出，而这两个声音由同一个心灵操控。这要求人类访客基因工程出“拥有统一心灵”的双胞胎翻译者。

Other stories go yet further, pushing us to the very boundary of communicability – and beyond. At the farthest extreme of alterity is Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), where the complex behaviour of its titular planetary ocean defies all notions of sentience, understanding and even life:
其他故事则走得更远，推动我们达到交流能力的极限——甚至超越极限。在异质性的最远端，是斯坦尼斯瓦夫·莱姆（Stanisław Lem）的小说《索拉里斯》（Solaris，1961），其同名行星海洋的复杂行为挑战了所有关于感知、理解甚至生命的概念：

Its undulating surface was capable of giving rise to the most diverse formations that bore no resemblance to anything terrestrial, on top of which the purpose – adaptive, cognitive, or whatever – of those often violent eruptions of plasmic ‘creativity’ remained a total mystery.
它起伏的表面能够产生各种各样的形态，这些形态与地球上的任何事物都毫无相似之处，而这些常常剧烈爆发的等离子“创造力”的目的——无论是适应性的、认知性的，还是其他什么——仍然是一个完全的谜团。

In Lem’s vision, decades of vigorous research in the pandisciplinary field of ‘Solaristics’ have failed to identify any comprehensible human meaning in the godlike sea of plasma. The sea, however, has no trouble simulating our consciousness and sense of meaning, as evidenced by the recreation of the protagonist’s long-dead lover from his memory. But the protagonist struggles to fathom the intention, if any, of this replication. Even when the ocean anthropomorphises itself through humanlike forms, he cannot make sense of it within his narrow anthropomorphic framework.
在莱姆的设想中，数十年来在跨学科领域“太阳学”中的大量研究未能在这片神一般的等离子体海洋中发现任何可理解的人类意义。然而，这片海洋却能轻松模拟我们的意识和意义感，这一点从它根据主角的记忆重现其早已逝去的爱人可见一斑。但主角却难以理解这种复制的意图是否存在。即使当这片海洋通过类人形态拟人化自己时，他也无法在自己狭隘的人类中心框架内理解这一切。

These narratives illustrate how science fiction that explores the otherness of extraterrestrials thoroughly and penetratingly can propel us beyond the comfort zone of humanlike aliens – a space within which SETI and xenolinguistic theory remain trapped.
这些叙述展示了科幻作品如何通过深入细致地探讨外星生命的异质性，推动我们超越类人外星人的舒适区——而这个空间正是 SETI 和异星语言学理论所困囿的领域。

If we did encounter an apparent message from beyond Earth, how difficult would it be to understand? Where between the poles of communicability – from the naive anthropomorphism of Star Wars’s Galactic Basic to the utter inscrutability of Lem’s plasma ocean – would such a signal likely fall? This is the central problem for xenolinguistics.
如果我们真的接收到来自地球之外的明显信息，要理解它会有多难？在可交流性的极端之间——从《星球大战》中天真的人类中心主义的银河通用语，到莱姆笔下完全难以理解的等离子海洋——这样的信号最有可能落在哪个位置？这正是异星语言学的核心问题。

Several theoretical arguments cherished by xenolinguistics proponents assert that we should expect extraterrestrials to occupy the anthropomorphic side of the spectrum. The most influential of these comes from the AI pioneer Marvin Minsky’s paper ‘Communication with Alien Intelligence’ (1985). Minsky had previously tested the simplest possible computational algorithms and found that most performed pointless operations. However, under the same constraints, some algorithms did something different: they performed a similar counting operation. By analogy, Minsky asserted that all species in the Universe, given the shared constraints of matter in space and time, would likewise converge on the same simple cognitive solutions. This ubiquitous mental foundation, he concluded, should make communication between humans and extraterrestrials possible, both mathematically and linguistically.
异星语言学支持者珍视的几个理论论点断言，我们应当预期外星生命会处于类人一侧的光谱上。其中最具影响力的是人工智能先驱马文·明斯基在 1985 年发表的论文《与外星智能的交流》。明斯基此前测试了最简单的计算算法，发现大多数执行的是无意义的操作。然而，在相同的约束条件下，有些算法做了不同的事情：它们执行了类似的计数操作。通过类比，明斯基断言，宇宙中所有物种鉴于空间和时间中物质的共同约束，也会趋同于相同的简单认知解决方案。他得出结论，这种普遍存在的心理基础应当使人类与外星生命之间的交流在数学和语言上都成为可能。

Building on this argument in a paper published in Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language, Noam Chomsky and his co-authors Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull speculated that Chomsky’s seminal theory of ‘universal grammar’ may apply to all intelligent beings, not just humans. In recent decades, research on universal grammar has focused on a concept called ‘merge’, which is a simple operation that combines two syntactic objects (such as words or phrases) without altering them. Proponents believe that merge is an innate structure that underlies all known languages. In the paper, the authors suggest that merge could be one of the evolutionary solutions that Minsky thought all organisms would discover. If so, every intelligent being in the Universe would necessarily evolve a language faculty like our own. Universal grammar would then become truly universal, what I think of as ‘cosmic grammar’: a hardwired guarantee of the potential for a dialogue between intelligent beings across space and time.
基于这一论点，在《异星语言学：迈向外星语言科学》一文中，诺姆·乔姆斯基及其合著者伊恩·罗伯茨和杰弗里·沃图穆尔推测，乔姆斯基开创性的“普遍语法”理论可能适用于所有智能生命，而不仅仅是人类。近几十年来，关于普遍语法的研究聚焦于一个称为“合并”的概念，这是一种简单的操作，将两个句法对象（如单词或短语）结合起来而不改变它们。支持者认为，合并是所有已知语言的天生结构。文章中，作者们提出，合并可能是明斯基认为所有生物都会发现的进化解决方案之一。如果是这样，宇宙中每一个智能生命必然会进化出类似我们自己的语言能力。普遍语法将真正成为普遍存在的，即我所称的“宇宙语法”：一种硬连线的保证，使跨越时空的智能生命之间的对话成为可能。

If only such reasoning held together. The first problem is the assumption that the brain or mind is computational. Today, many psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers reject the computational metaphor of the mind. If they are correct, the analogy between computation and cognition essential to Minsky’s argument (and the argument for cosmic grammar) breaks apart.
如果这种推理能够成立就好了。第一个问题是大脑或心智是计算性的这一假设。如今，许多心理学家、神经科学家和哲学家都拒绝将心智比作计算机的隐喻。如果他们是对的，那么计算与认知之间的类比——这是明斯基论证（以及宇宙语法论证）的核心——就会瓦解。

The fallback for xenolinguistics devotees is to insist that math and logic must be understood universally
异星语言学的拥护者的后备论点是坚持认为数学和逻辑必须被普遍理解。

But even if this outdated cognitivist trope stands, many linguists have challenged the notion that humans possess universal grammar, pointing to alternative theories that explain how language can be acquired without a shared innate faculty. Others have argued that even if cosmic grammar grants every being the same innate computational system for generating syntactic structures, differences in a separate system we require to generate the words and concepts that endow those structures with meaning could still make humans and aliens mutually incomprehensible. Moreover, even if the gulf separating our semantic cognition is traversable, language is always contextual. This throws doubt on the likelihood of decoding messages from aliens without prior knowledge of their bodies, senses, and how these might guide communication in their native habitats.
但即便这一过时的认知主义陈词滥调成立，许多语言学家也质疑人类拥有普遍语法的观点，提出了其他理论来解释语言如何在没有共享先天能力的情况下被习得。还有人认为，即使宇宙语法赋予每个生命体相同的先天计算系统来生成句法结构，我们用以生成赋予这些结构意义的词汇和概念的另一套系统的差异，仍可能使人类与外星人相互无法理解。此外，即使我们语义认知之间的鸿沟是可以跨越的，语言始终是有上下文的。这使得在不了解外星生命体的身体、感官以及这些如何引导其本土环境中的交流的情况下，解码其信息的可能性变得值得怀疑。

This argument is bolstered by the philosopher David Ellis’s chapter in Exophilosophy: The Philosophical Implications of Alien Life (2024), titled ‘If An Alien Could Talk, Could We Understand It?’, which is a play on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s provocation: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein put forward the theory that we communicate through a series of language games, such as chatting at a dinner party, telling a joke, or screaming a warning. The meaning of particular expressions can be understood only in the context of the language game within which they are used, while the meaning of a game is determined by the form of life of its players. But since humans and lions do not share a form of life, we would be unable to understand them, even if they somehow uttered our words. Extraterrestrials might have a form of life that diverges in even more radical ways, entailing that their language would elude us. The only exception, Ellis argues, would be if aliens and humans were to establish societies together and cultivate a communal form of life through which we could play shared language games. However, Ellis’s optimistic scenario seems to require aliens whose biological constitution matches ours so closely that they could live as we do – a narrower version of anthropomorphism even than the one entertained by Sagan, who thought that alien interlocutors may not necessarily be carbon based.
这一论点得到了哲学家大卫·埃利斯在《外哲学：外星生命的哲学意义》（2024）一书中题为《如果外星人能说话，我们能理解吗？》一章的支持，该标题戏仿了路德维希·维特根斯坦的挑衅：“如果狮子会说话，我们也无法理解它。”在《哲学研究》（1953）中，维特根斯坦提出了我们通过一系列语言游戏进行交流的理论，比如在晚宴上聊天、讲笑话或发出警告。特定表达的意义只能在其所用语言游戏的语境中被理解，而游戏的意义则由参与者的生活形式决定。但由于人类和狮子不共享生活形式，即使狮子能说出我们的话，我们也无法理解它们。外星生命体的生活形式可能以更激进的方式不同，这意味着它们的语言将难以被我们理解。埃利斯认为，唯一的例外是如果外星人与人类共同建立社会，并培养一种共同的生活形式，从而能够进行共享的语言游戏。然而，埃利斯的乐观设想似乎要求外星人的生物构造与我们极为相似，以至于他们能像我们一样生活——这比卡尔·萨根所设想的拟人化版本还要狭隘，后者认为外星对话者不一定是基于碳的生命。

The fallback for xenolinguistics devotees here is to insist that, even if natural language is a dead end, math and logic must be understood universally. This view has undergirded the design of most interstellar messages sent to date, and of astrolanguages like Lincos, but is an area, again, where philosophers and mathematicians disagree. The standard justification for such a view relies on expert intuition – specifically the belief that numbers exist, in a Platonic sense, independently of human minds. In other words, these experts assert that mathematics is something humans discovered rather than invented. Yet, if mathematicians are to make bold assertions about the cosmic validity of human mathematics, especially when these claims have implications for empirical science, they should support them with formal proof rather than intuition. And even if extraterrestrials do share our mathematics, the cognitive, syntactic, semantic and contextual difficulties would still make meaningful communication highly unlikely.
异星语言学的拥护者在这里的后备论点是坚持认为，即使自然语言是一条死胡同，数学和逻辑也必须被普遍理解。这一观点支撑了迄今为止大多数星际信息的设计，以及像 Lincos 这样的星际语言，但这又是哲学家和数学家们存在分歧的领域。这种观点的标准理由依赖于专家直觉——具体来说，是相信数字以柏拉图式的方式独立于人类心智而存在。换言之，这些专家断言数学是人类发现的，而非发明的。然而，如果数学家要对人类数学的宇宙有效性做出大胆断言，尤其当这些主张对经验科学有影响时，他们应当用形式证明而非直觉来支持这些主张。即使外星生命体共享我们的数学，认知、句法、语义和语境上的困难仍将使有意义的交流极不可能。

This theoretical pessimism has empirical support. We have struggled for decades to decode animal communication, even that of our mammal relatives. Some have concluded that animals lack anything like language, but it is equally possible that our methods are shoddy, or that humans are constitutionally incapable of understanding other species. Even more disheartening is our failure to decipher the scripts of numerous dead languages. Our difficulties divining the thoughts of terrestrial organisms, including members of our own species, ought to chasten our confidence in cracking the enigma of interlocutors who might have emerged on some unknown world.
这种理论上的悲观主义得到了实证支持。我们几十年来一直在努力解码动物的交流，甚至是我们哺乳类亲属的交流。有些人得出结论认为动物根本没有类似语言的东西，但同样有可能是我们的方法粗糙，或者人类天生无法理解其他物种。更令人沮丧的是，我们未能破译许多死语言的文字。我们在解读地球生物（包括我们自己物种成员）思想上的困难，应当让我们对破解可能出现在某个未知世界的对话者之谜保持谦逊。

Alongside the ongoing failure of our quest for alien messages, the above arguments would seem to leave the prospects for a xenolinguistic science highly uncertain. They suggest that there are no linguistic extraterrestrials within range of us and that, even if there were, we would be unable to communicate with them. However, I believe there can still be great value in xenolinguistics – as long as those seeking communication can jettison the presumption that the aliens we find will be like us.
随着我们寻找外星信息的持续失败，上述论点似乎使得异星语言学作为一门科学的前景变得极为不确定。它们暗示，在我们可及范围内不存在语言上的外星生命，即使存在，我们也无法与之沟通。然而，我认为异星语言学仍然具有巨大价值——前提是那些寻求交流的人能够摒弃“我们遇到的外星人会像我们一样”的假设。

Recent xenolinguistics papers have adopted the opposite approach, attempting to theorise alien language only from existing knowledge of human and animal communication on Earth. However, at minimum, xenolinguistics must implicitly posit an alien interlocutor, which demands an act of imaginative extrapolation. To even conceive of an alien language in the absence of an alien message is to already be engaging in the speculative mode of thought that characterises science fiction.
近期的异星语言学论文采取了相反的路径，试图仅基于现有的人类和地球动物交流知识来理论化外星语言。然而，至少异星语言学必须隐含地假设一个外星对话者，这就需要进行富有想象力的推演。即使在没有收到外星信息的情况下设想外星语言，也已经是在进行科幻小说所特有的推测性思维。

The necessity of such speculation would persist well beyond first contact. For even if we were to receive a love letter from the cosmos tomorrow, it might take decades, or infinitely longer, to decode. Naturally, there would be ambiguity, igniting protracted debates on the precise interpretation. A response may take just as long for us to formulate. And then, we would wait for information to arrive, perhaps for centuries, while our interlocutor remained shrouded in mystery. During this conversation across light years, extrapolations that overstep our scant data and hard-nosed scientific norms would be irresistible. Even if we were to come face to face with such linguistic aliens (assuming they have faces), their language would likely remain partially incomprehensible, necessitating more imaginative leaps to fill in the gaps. Finally, supposing we succeeded with one language, there would still be a whole multiverse of possible languages demanding a repeat of the same slow process. Xenolinguistics, therefore, is destined to be inextricably bound with science-fiction speculation for ages to come – perhaps for as long as we pursue it.
这种推测的必要性将在首次接触之后依然存在。即使明天我们收到来自宇宙的情书，解码它也可能需要数十年，甚至更久。自然，这其中会存在歧义，引发对精确解读的长期争论。我们可能同样需要很长时间来制定回应。然后，我们将等待信息的到来，可能长达数百年，而我们的对话者依然笼罩在神秘之中。在这场跨越光年的对话中，超越我们有限数据和严谨科学规范的推断将难以抗拒。即使我们与这样的语言外星人面对面（假设他们有“脸”），他们的语言很可能仍部分难以理解，需要更多富有想象力的飞跃来填补空白。最后，假设我们成功破解了一种语言，仍有无数可能的语言等待我们重复同样缓慢的过程。因此，异星语言学注定将在未来很长一段时间内与科幻推测紧密相连——或许只要我们继续探索它。

Xenolinguistics liberated from anthropomorphic bias posits a spectrum of infinite linguistic alterity
摆脱拟人偏见的异星语言学假设存在一个无限语言他异性的光谱

Some might take this insinuation of an intimate relationship between xenolinguistics and sci-fi as a denunciation of the former, taking the naive stance that science pursues truth, while fiction merely lies. However, if these uneasy bedfellows can embrace, as they must, the study of xenolinguistics will be an immense boon to humanity, irrespective of whether it will ever produce scientific knowledge in the traditional sense. How so? By serving as an exercise in opening us up to the maximum degree of otherness conceivable.
有人可能会将异星语言学与科幻小说之间这种密切关系的暗示视为对前者的否定，抱持天真的观点，认为科学追求真理，而虚构只是谎言。然而，如果这两个看似不搭界的领域能够相互拥抱——正如它们必须的那样——异星语言学的研究将极大地造福人类，无论它是否能以传统意义产生科学知识。为什么？因为它作为一种练习，能最大限度地打开我们对“他者”的想象力。

For xenolinguistics to realise this potential, researchers and storytellers alike must cast off the anthropomorphism that has typically infected both SETI and science fiction. Our tendency to project our characteristics onto the world has been pointed out at least since the 6th century BCE when the philosopher Xenophanes complained that Greek gods acted like humans in stories and myths. As the philosopher David Hume put it in his essay ‘The Natural History of Religion’ (1757): ‘There is an universal tendency amongst mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities.’
为了实现这一潜力，研究者和讲故事的人都必须摒弃长期以来感染 SETI 和科幻的拟人化倾向。自公元前 6 世纪哲学家色诺芬尼指出希腊神话中的神像人类一样行事以来，我们将自身特质投射到世界的倾向就被揭示出来。正如哲学家大卫·休谟在其 1757 年论文《宗教的自然历史》中所言：“人类普遍倾向于将所有存在想象成像自己一样，并将这些品质转移到每一个对象上。”

We can begin to counteract this tendency by accepting that we have no idea what aliens are like. Since nothing definitive can be said about the alien interlocutor that is axiomatic to the field, it is most reasonable to stipulate instead beings whose difference from us is indeterminate. That is, xenolinguistics liberated from anthropomorphic bias posits a spectrum of infinite linguistic alterity. Once the fetters of anthropomorphism are loosened, the essence of xenolinguistics is revealed to be a state of readiness to receive or initiate communication with any possible other – whether a godlike ocean, a time-transcendent Heptapod, or a man on the ‘Moone’.
我们可以开始抵消这种倾向，接受我们根本不知道外星人是什么样子。既然关于异星对话者这一领域公理性的前提无法得出确定结论，那么最合理的做法是规定其与我们之间的差异是不可确定的。也就是说，摆脱拟人偏见的异星语言学假设存在一个无限语言他异性的光谱。一旦摆脱了拟人枷锁，异星语言学的本质便显现为一种准备状态，随时接受或发起与任何可能“他者”的交流——无论是神一般的海洋、超越时间的七足怪，还是“月球”上的人。

But while we wait – perhaps in vain – for a signal from the stars, the immediate value of xenolinguistics lies closer to home. By returning to its speculative roots, the science of alien language offers a way to imaginatively demolish the barriers we’ve built between ourselves and other terrestrial beings. We inhabit a world in which algorithms corral us into petty tribalism, populists and fake news stoke xenophobic nationalism, and indifference to the plight of other species sustains both factory farming and anthropogenic mass extinction. Opening ourselves to every conceivable degree of otherness can, even if only abstractly, broaden the scope of our toleration and renew our appreciation for the diversity of aliens that already exist here on Earth.
但在我们等待——或许是徒劳地等待——来自星际的信号时，异星语言学的直接价值更贴近我们自身。回归其推测性根基，外星语言科学为我们提供了一种想象力上的方式，去打破我们与其他地球生物之间筑起的壁垒。我们生活在一个算法将我们划分为狭隘部落主义、民粹主义者和假新闻煽动排外民族主义、对其他物种困境的冷漠维系着工厂化养殖和人为大规模灭绝的世界。即使只是抽象地，向所有可想象的“他者”敞开，也能拓宽我们的包容范围，重新唤起我们对地球上已存在的多样“异类”的欣赏。