‘Nothing fascinates for long,’ my Nonna used to say, sometimes as a commentary upon her granddaughter’s short attention span, sometimes to dismiss the latest headline-making scientific discovery.
Her wisdom would not hit home until three decades into the next millennium, about four weeks after we first made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
I was appointed to the communication team for my training as a field linguist, but it was my work in artificial intelligence that proved instrumental in setting up exchange channels. It turned out that we didn’t need to learn the aliens’ languages. Instead we wrote software that mined their equivalent of our internet and created a two-way translation device. Before long, conversation with our distant neighbours was as mundane as using the ‘chat’ function on a customer service site.
I was bored. And it bothered me that no matter how much we ‘talked’ with our extraterrestrial interlocutors, we weren’t learning anything about their languages.
‘Why would you need to learn their languages?’ my husband Gary asked. ‘Language is for communication, right? You’re already communicating with them.’
His question tripped an inexplicable sadness in me, a longing that could never be translated into the limited lexicon of our lingua franca.
Our son was watching an online video about mycelium. ‘Language isn’t for communication,’ he said. ‘It’s how things are structured.’
His words riveted my attention to his screen, which showed a time-lapse sequence of a white fungal net stretching out over a vast forest. I felt my breath catch. I too was caught, captivated by this silent, linguistically rich ecosystem, a structure so compelling that, despite Nonna’s prophecy, its fascination might endure.