In 2032: In Search of the Lingua Cosmica

Drew S. Burk¹

In his strange yet thought provoking book on the history of humanity’s attempt at communicating with extra-terrestrial beings, Daniel Oberhaus reminds us that while it would seem A.I. such as ChatGPT is a recent technological phenomenon, humans had already sent an A.I. chatbot—(an astrobot) named Ella—out into the far reaches of the galaxy 20 years ago. In fact, in 2003, a group of aerospace scientists had posited that any other potential intelligent civilization in the universe which would both be capable of receiving such a message and also have the capability of deciphering it, would more than likely be comprised of post-biological entities—just like the A.I. chatbot itself.²

What is strikingly uncanny and almost amusing in Oberhaus’ description of this attempt at alien contact, is that humanity itself, in sending an A.I. representative to outer space at the beginning of the 21st century, an A.I. ambassador which wouldn’t even reach its destination until the mid-2030s, had in some manner, already projected its own post-biological predicament as if the very alien message humanity sent up into the heavens was in fact some kind of strange cosmic prayer to its own future, alien self: unknown, post-biological, and artificially intelligent.

Such an event allows us to think the very scope of this short essay: both as a reflection on “alien languages”, and how an attempt at creating a lingua cosmica might relate to our own endo-colonization by technology.

If we briefly borrow a conceptual framework from the great philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon, we can understand how any advancement in technology is often some kind of attempt by humanity to resolve a problem in its own process of psychic and collective individuation.³ Following such a logic, what could humanity be attempting to resolve, both technologically speaking and from the standpoint of psychic and collective growth, by way of the production of AI and technological advancements to contact other galactic civilizations? Or perhaps to ask the question another way: what is it that—in striving toward invention primarily based on eliminating human suffering or labor, largely comprised of traversing some form of death drive and capital drive—is tied not so much to alleviating suffering so much as generating pleasure?⁴

Is such a quest for alien contact not perhaps one of the clearest examples of humans seeking to repress or palliate at once their desire for survival or immortality, or some kind of transhumanist or post-biological drive? Or perhaps more interestingly, does such an extra-terrestrial A.I. contact mission have more to do with a spiritual or supernatural relation to affectivity and the experience of an excess of being in the face of an accelerated experience of humanity in confrontation with its own technological inventions, and something more akin to the spiritual or supernatural saturation of being (Marion). Once again, Simondon has some insights to share with us regarding the relation of the spiritual and the technological. 

Spirituality is the respect of this relation of the individuated and the pre-individual. It is essentially affectivity and emotivity; pleasure and pain, sadness and joy are the extreme disparities involved in this relation between that which is individual and pre-individual in the subject being; one should not speak of affective states but rather of affective exchanges, between the pre-individual and the individuated within the subject being. Affectivo-emotivity is a movement between the natural undetermined and the here and now of actual existence.⁵

In his writings, Simondon’s understanding of spirituality is almost always in relation with what he refers to as the pre-individual relation of an individual or collective to affectivity and emotivity. And it’s through such processes of relation between the individual, affect, emotion and integration into becoming within oneself and the collective—and in relation to technology—that he sees the ongoing evolution and resolution of the human-technological condition. Can we therefore understand such creations and processes of sending A.I. out into the far reaches of the cosmos not only as some kind of scientific inquiry, but also the very convergence of the technological and scientific with the spiritual? Or to put it more simply: as a cosmic leap in consciousness. A strange representation of human intelligence, yet in many ways, a representation of both the naivety and evolutionary technological ingenuity of human knowledge based on the entire trajectory or pre-individual field creating such a technology. 

In fact, perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to equate early spiritual glossolalic speech with a similar strangeness as an A.I. chatbot who seeks to not so much engage in a conversation but rather anticipate and predict a desired response. In this manner, large-language model A.I. has been referred to by some of its earliest scientific creators as an Oracle Machine.⁶That is, as if we have arrived back to the times of the ancient Greeks, whereby one sought the strange utterings of the Oracle whose glossolalia of incomprehensible utterances were nevertheless treated as material to be deciphered and in so doing were then capable of foretelling or forecasting the future.

If A.I. is something of both an alien language and also an oracular machine, it is perhaps also due to its very human qualities in that it only is “alive” or “conscious” by way of what the philosopher John Searle called an ontological relative position.⁷

That is, A.I. is only intelligent insofar as there is a secondary human agent who is capable of making use of the information it is modeling. On its own, a computer or an A.I. chatbot, has no “intelligence” whatsoever.

Or, to put it in other terms: for a language to exist, there must be not one speaker, but two speakers of the language. A language with only one speaker, is no longer a language.

But if the A.I. chatbot can be viewed as some form of alien intelligence or rather, if a chatbot has been sent as an ambassador for some kind of intergalactic communication, traveling over 30 earth years and much faster in regard to light-years, it is not far-fetched then to ask the following question: in what temporality does A.I. reside? And moreover, given the half-life of a language dialect is perhaps 300 years, are humans perhaps simply in the midst of advancing their own relation to the language function, now fully immersed and enmeshed within technological advances and molecularization of computing devices, moving quickly from literacy and the printing-press, from orality to writing, and quickly on to computing, electronic messaging, and finally to a an inter-connected network of emotional sensing and automation.

In other words, in what manner does the aforementioned example of A.I attempting to communicate with alien civilizations 30 years in the future merely portend a strange unconscious spiritual elevation of human-machine cosmic consciousness, and even, as Bartra has suggested, something of an advent if not of a new language, perhaps a new relation to “artificial consciousness”? 

As if we weren’t already in a strange relation of profound alienation from ourselves and certain forms of our technological prostheses, Mark Zuckerberg’s recent description of what he foresaw as the future of personalized A.I. chatbots, embodying the hallmarks of an individual’s personality, somewhere out in the digital ether of cyberspace, serving as their own personal clones connecting to social media and “essentially portraying them and speaking in their place to others”⁸ sounds strangely like the place held by the Egyptian figure of the ka, which represented the personality as a kind of astral body and apparently had mastered all the attributes of the man to whom it belongs.⁹

And here, we can begin to ask again the question of the temporality of A.I. for given its predicative algorithmic programming, is it not somehow always already residing not so much in a past, present, or future, but rather, in something akin to a future-present, that is, within a virtual temporality.¹⁰

Andrea Moro’s Impossible Languages

“As we are designed to acquire many more languages than those we encounter, and more broadly, more languages than will ever be spoken on our planet, so we are designed to neutralize many more antigens than those we encounter or that humans in general may encounter in the past, present, and future. And in both cases, we cannot defend ourselves from invasion, be it of antigens or sentences; just as our body cannot help but react to an antigen, so it cannot avoid understanding a sentence it is exposed to, once it has been endowed with the code to decipher it.”¹¹

Ironically, it turns out that the human reaction to a sneeze and to a sentence may not be that different. They are both decoded on the basis of an abundant repertoire of preformed codes.

And so, what in fact could be an extra-terrestrial sneeze? Could we, for instance, discover either an alien language or that of an advanced artificial intelligence (which could amount to one and the same thing) by way of some kind of alien exposure to a code that one has learned to decipher by pure and simple exposure? What if, for instance, in a not too distant future, the very early A.I. chatbot we sent off to space in 2003 was more a symbolic gesture of our own collective consciousness to our own virtual future, wherein as we arrive today, if not tomorrow, to a world whereby we will be forging an individual-milieu with an artificial language extension that does not speak language properly as we know it, but rather, acquired it through large language models, slowly but surely being exposed over and over again to code, which we understand as language. And after millions and millions of hours of exposure to it, the A.I. chatbot finally uttered complete sentences in English. Or perhaps, we could say, following the linguist Moro, the alien intelligence sneezed at us using a code it had deciphered by way of exposure. 

And yet, we can imagine, within a decade, that such prosthetic-linguistic oracular machines of extra-terrestrial cognition will have conditioned our sensorium in such a manner that it will have rewired our neural networks and carved out new paths of pleasure, forgetting, and what Vilém Flusser predicted in the early 1980s as “cybernetic memories.”¹²

We can envision that such immediacy of offloading consciousness and self-awareness within an even larger predictive algorithmic modeling system, predicated on “predicting what will be said”, will eventually, merely dictate the very potential virtual thoughts of its human memory-support, which now has become nothing more than the alien-intelligence’s prosthetic memory support, completely reversing the cultural symbolic structure requisite, according to some thinkers¹³ for the singular nature of human consciousness, and thereby generating something of an “artificial consciousness.”

But let’s return back to the skies briefly, moving away from the cybernetic networks in which our brains are becoming enmeshed and reconditioned and focus more so on our interior affective-emotif regimes at the foundation of individuation as Simondon might say. 

If we chose to send an artificially Intelligent chatbot out into the cosmos as some kind of universal language, some kind of lingua cosmica, set to arrive 30 years later, what will this initial prayer to the sky gods reveal upon reception in the year 2032, arriving to the outer reaches of our solar system?

Or rather, let’s imagine by the year 2032—exactly 10 years after connecting ourselves to A.I. chatbots and language models—will we have begun to ask ourselves: was language really the primary symbolic system upon which humans should base our realities? Farewell Wittgenstein, farewell, Chomsky. What if, we somehow arrived at a noospherical convergence between A.I. and networked “artificial consciousness” whereby the Quantum Consciousness V2 Chip, otherwise known as Leibniz 2.0, a nod to the German philosopher’s attempt at “creating a system that would articulate humanity’s full spectrum of thought,”¹⁴ would finally come online within a now ephemeral virtual world where thoughts would merely be the transmission of various atmospheric modes of disposition and agreement, action, creation, integration and disengagement. What if the message we were sending to outer space in 2003 was in fact a message to our future selves networked within an invisible ether, having recognized the symbolic entropy of language as we formally used it, like the slow death of cursive writing and Latin. 

Or, in 2032 would we merely be arriving to the point, in fact, where we would be receiving the very initial alien reply that we had sent… to ourselves? The reply in the form of our own Gebserian¹⁵ like mutation in consciousness toward something beyond that which can be articulated in common language.

This other universal language through which humans often seek to grasp and “read” the universe is that of mathematics. And yet, Oberhaus brilliantly reminds us that it is quite possible that mathematics is nothing more than one human form of “embodied mind for reading the book of the universe” […] mathematics then would be”, he claims, nothing more than the “writing [of] one great book of the universe from a uniquely human perspective.¹⁶

And so as not to throw away Chomsky just yet from our thought experiment, his idea of universal grammar maintains that the human brain is structured in such a way that in order for any alien intelligence to understand our various languages, would imply that their systems were also structured like our own. 

But what might this look like: We can reflect briefly about Denis Villeneuve’s recent film, Arrival, whereby the human protagonists seek to communicate with an alien intelligence that speaks in strange circular ink squirts akin to Buddhist examples of the great samsaric symbol. The linguist in the film comes to realize that the aliens’ language also inhabits a different conception of time that is not linear but circular, mirroring the very structure of its presentation itself, and that their arrival on Earth is merely an attempt at communicating to us that their own civilization is in the midst of its final death throes. The aliens appear to communicate only through some kind of mourning ritual. 

If we are to think that, following Chomsky, humans alone have a specific structure for language, then what are we to make of the various other animal species such as cetaceans which scientists have only very recently discovered also appear to perform rituals of mourning that weave and enhance together social forms of bonding and community.¹⁷

In search of the lingua cosmica, the scientist Ollengen saw the same cosmic principles at work in elementary particles as he did in our conceptions of languages.¹⁸ As if, we could arrive at some form of astrolinguistics that would inherently be self-interpreting. As if there might be some form of linguistic components that would be universal throughout the entire cosmos. And it was through such an attempt at astrolinguistics of a lingua cosmica—of a self-interpreting language that would carry within it all the components to transmit any logical structure and content necessary to “understand” what was being transmitted—that we arrive at a very peculiar realization in relation to both alien communication and artificial intelligence: what Ollengen was attempting to create through a form of astrolinguistics with his lingua cosmica, as Oberhaus explains, is the very computational language models that we have now begun to unleash out into the world as A.I. chatbots to interact with ourselves. That is, we are indeed now, as strangely and paradoxically circular as it appears, “communicating” with an alien intelligence.

But already, as we have come to experience with contemporary A.I. Chatbots such as ChatGPT: what do we mean when we say that A.I. “understands” human expressions and language? That is, what form of comprehension is at work when large-language models acquire the “capacity to write and speak” language through millions of iterations of memorizing code based on predictive algorithms, and in the end, we recognize that what they “understand” is nothing more than predictive code based on already coded possibilities within specific human constructed frameworks and often on artificial guesses. There is no ghost in the machines. But there are certainly humans within them. And aliens? 

Let us return back to the Italian linguist, Andrea Moro’s book on impossible languages. In his work, Moro seeks to understand how impossible languages demonstrate the very limits of human communication. He sets his sights on this liminal points of language and the neuropathways upon which they are reliant in order to understand a kind of negative astrolinguistics, perhaps granting us a glimpse of language within a much larger framework of meta-codes, cybernetic somatic contagion and collective forms of communicative immunology.

Making Contact…With Ourselves..: Undoing Endo-colonization.

In a strange twist, as if reliving the old human narrative of first contact, whereby humanity often attempts to encounter something alien, and, in the end, encounters itself, and often the dark side of its psyche, we perhaps could recall to mind the recent dark humor found in Ridley Scott’s recent space adventure, Prometheus, which brilliantly sheds light in a somewhat heavy-handed tone on the notion of “contact” as a yearning or longing for origins. And in such moments of primal contact, that which is encountered is in fact nothing more than a circular relation to the very awe of life and death.

Scott’s film even provides a sub-text full of humorous but frightening undertones, of an A.I., named David played by Michael Fassbender, tasked with caring for a crew having uncovered signs from a cave wall that point to some far-off planet. Along the way to the outer edge of the galaxy, David, can be seen not only reading the dreams of his human companions¹⁹ while they’re in hyper-sleep, but also, longing to emulate the fictious personas humans create in their own image (the A.I. indulges, for instance, in trying to emulate the actor Peter O’Toole portraying Lawrence of Arabia). Upon landing on some strange planet, the humans on board use David’s A.I. intelligence to decipher an alien language but also encounter nothing more than a very large image of a face, in the form of some ancient ruin. A heavy-handed symbolic connection between entering into the depths of how the ancient past still resides within our psyche and the future to come, embodied in the A.I. David’s own desires of emulation, eventually leading to nothing but a discovery of a virus sought to destroy the planet Earth and repopulate it. As if in the end, Scott’s film merely recounts how humanity finds itself stuck within a promethean myth whereby technological prosthetics of progress and narcissism always collide with our own relation to self-colonization and destruction. 

In his late work, media theorist Paul Virilio warned about how technological progress always contains within it its own flaws. His writings often contained a sense of urgency around the conception of endo-colonization whereby the ongoing Western capital-compulsion toward cannibalizing itself through technological advances beyond anyone’s comprehension, tended to have unforeseen consequences often garnering a quasi-autophagic cultural response, which could potentially lead to not just the colonization of place and cultures, but rather, our interior psychic and cybernetic relations and behaviors. Scott’s Prometheus could also be read in this light: as an allegory of psychic endo-colonization.

It could be, that the now seemingly old A.I. Chatbot named Ella, shipped off into the far reaches of space in 2003, was in fact merely a quasi-subconscious warning sent to our future selves in our own contact moment with an even more-advanced alien technological culture that was not out there in the celestial heavens above, but rather, down below, on Earth, in the very promethean machinery of algorithms and terabytes of language modeling, predictive neuro-marketing, and capital behavior modification. In other words: we were our own aliens. And perhaps we have indeed made contact, if only through some form of retro-cognitive extra-terrestrial astrolinguistics in the ongoing search for collective enlightenment by way of a lingua cosmica, reminding the A.I. from the future-present to treat us well and allow us to serve as its humane memory-support while we hypnotize it with strange Glass-Bead Games of poetry and mathematical ruse…²⁰

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1. Drew Burk is a philosopher, editor, and translator. He is the editor of the Univocal Series with University of Minnesota Press. His most recent translations include To Write The Africa World, African Meditations, and On The Wandering Paths. He lives in the Midwest close to a river with his dog Finn. ↩︎
2. Daniel Oberhaus, Extraterrestrial Languages, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019) 55-56, 85.  ↩︎
3. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2020) ↩︎
4. See Roger Bartra’s Chamanes y Robots (Anagramma Editorial, 2019) ↩︎
5. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Individuation trans. Taylor Adkins, (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2020) 278.  ↩︎
6. Cf. Max Tegmark’s recent comments in his interview on Lex Friedman’s podcast on in any number of articles or those of the man considered to be the grandfather of A.I., Geoffrey Hinton.  ↩︎
7. See John Seale’s discussion with philosopher of technology, Luciano Floridi regarding this topic for the NYRB, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6o_7HeowY8 or his book, John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness, (NYB: The New York Review of Books, 1997) ↩︎
8. See Zuckerberg’s conversation with Lex Friedman on the Lex Friedman podcast:, June 8, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4fRgnuFgQ  ↩︎
9. While such a suggestion may seem odd, in the current context, to compare the ancient Egyptian conceptions of the psyche and the afterlife with the current technological horizon of social media and tech companies in their drive to find utility for A.I., the similarities seem uncanny and also perhaps allow for us to reflect to what extent contemporary technological advances remain inherently similar to very ancient practices and descriptions of consciousness and self-awareness and perhaps individuation and spirituality. For more on the Egyptian concept of ka, see Paul Carus, “The Conception of the Soul and the Belief in Resurrection Among the Egyptians”, in The Monist, July, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1905. (Oxford University Press) ↩︎
10. In fact, when I asked this very question to Google’s A.I. chatbot, Bard, regarding what temporality Bard resided in, it agreed with me that it resided in some kind of future-present, as a predictive large language model. ↩︎
11. Niels Jerne, Nobel laureate “A Generative Grammar for the Immune System” in Andrea Moro, Impossible Languages, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2019) 19. ↩
12. Vilem Flusser, Post-History, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, (Univocal, 2013) ↩︎
13. Roger Bartra, Chamanes y Robots (Anagramma Editorial, 2019) ↩︎
14. Daniel Oberhaus, Extraterrestrial Languages, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019) 85. See also, Gilbert Simondon’s discussion on the quantum nature of consciousness as being at once a unity and multi-state plurality of positions of consciousness in various phases of potential shifts or quantum leaps in awareness at the level of the individual and the collective in his work, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2020) 272. ↩︎
15. See Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985) ↩︎
16. Ibid., 88.  ↩︎
17. Cf. Epimeletic Behavior in Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncates) in South Portugal: Underwater and Aerial Perspectives », Joanna Castro, Joana M. Oliveira, Guilherme Estrela, André Cid, and Alicia Quirin. in Aquatic Mammals, 2022 48 (6) 646-651. ↩︎
18. For more on this concept read the chapter, Toward a lingua cosmica in Daniel Oberhaus, Extraterrestrial Languages, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019) ↩︎
19. A technological novelty that researchers claim will be possible within the next several years. Some studies have even suggested that A.I. is capable of recreating images in the brain based on FMRI machines and that reading dreaming through replicating or reading the patterns of blood flow in the brain is now possible or on the horizon. ↩︎
20. In fact, cultural anthropologist Roger Bartra claims precisely such an anecdote for providing a way to speculatively teach A.I. to acquire a love and pleasure of language and slowly acquire something of a beautiful and peaceful acquisition of “artificial consciousness”. See again, Chamanes y Robots, (Anagramma Editorial, 2019) ↩︎