The illustration on the Pioneer 10 plaque. Designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. Artwork prepared by Linda Salzman Sagan. Photograph by NASA Ames Research Center (NASA-ARC)

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A World Speaks Its Technology

by Phil Hall

The search for alien techno-signatures requires a deep understanding of what is technology itself. The central contention of this essay is that particular technologies are not universal, inevitable outcomes of intelligence but products of culture and, more fundamentally, products of different languages. Therefore, our search for alien technology, ultimately, must be a search for the many possible technological expressions of alien languages (LX).

This essay has been written partly as a criticism of the Drake Equation. I present a suggestion for reformulation with a view to stressing that technology is not universal. Technology is contingent on language and culture. The assumption that technology is universal is a symptom of Western arrogance. Technology is not value free; look at the inscription Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan and Frank Drake sent off on Pioneer 10. It was a picture of patriarchal dominance; the man saluting to the aliens while the woman stood passively next to him.

The Drake Equation goes:

N = R* × fₚ × nₑ × fₗ × fᵢ × f꜀ × L

Where:

N is the number of civilisations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible

R* is the average rate of star formation in our galaxy

fₚ is the fraction of stars that have planets

nₑ is the average number of planets per star that could potentially support life

fₗ is the fraction of those planets that actually develop life

fᵢ is the fraction of those that develop intelligent life

f꜀ is the fraction of those that develop technology that releases detectable signals into space

L is the length of time such civilisations release detectable signals

Project Ozma was the first systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It established a paradigm that would dominate the field of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for six decades. The logic appeared sound: intelligence produces technology, technology produces radio waves, and radio waves can be detected across interstellar distances. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, penetrate interstellar dust, and can be generated with sufficient power to cross cosmic distances.

Humanity has been leaking radio signals into space since the early twentieth century. If we were detectable, the reasoning went, then other civilisations might be detectable too. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence became, in essence, a search for extraterrestrial radio broadcasts.

However, despite decades of increasingly sophisticated searches, from targeted observations of nearby stars to all-sky surveys, no confirmed extraterrestrial signal has ever been detected. The other possibility is that the perceived silence may be the result of our search strategy.

What if we have been searching for our own technological signature; radio waves produced by our specific evolutionary pathway, rather than asking the more fundamental question: what kind of signals would an alien intelligence, shaped by an alien environment, and with a language suited to that environment, actually produce?

Radio technology is not a universal endpoint of technological evolution but one possible expression among many, shaped by specific environmental, biological, and cognitive constraints. The conditions that made radio technology possible on Earth, a particular atmospheric composition, evolutionary history, linguistic and cognitive architecture, almost certainly do not hold elsewhere.

One might argue that radio technology is not merely one option among many but a likely universal because the laws of physics are the same everywhere. Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, penetrates interstellar dust, and can be generated with sufficient power to cross cosmic distances. Any civilisation that develops physics will discover electromagnetism, and any civilisation that discovers electromagnetism will eventually use it for communication.

This is a reasonable argument, but it is also, perhaps, a reflection of our own biases. We discovered electromagnetism because our senses are attuned to light, and our environment, a relatively transparent atmosphere, allowed us to see the stars. A species that evolved in a dark ocean, sensing the world primarily through electrical fields, might develop a physics of electromagnetism without ever developing astronomy. They would understand the principles of radio long before they ever looked at the sky. But would they build radio transmitters? Would they search for signals from other worlds? Perhaps not, if the concept of “other worlds” had never occurred to them.

The point is not that radio technology is impossible for aliens. It is that radio technology is not inevitable. It is one possible expression of technological development, shaped by specific environmental, biological, and cognitive constraints. The conditions that made radio technology possible on Earth, a particular atmospheric composition, evolutionary history, linguistic and cognitive architecture, almost certainly do not hold elsewhere. We should not be surprised by the radio silence because radio is just one of many possible technologies, and probably not the most common one on worlds unlike our own. The silence we hear may just reflect our own assumptions about what alien technology should look like.

What Is Technology?

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Before we can search for alien technology, we must first understand what technology is. This is not a simple question. The word comes from the Greek techne, meaning art, craft, or skill, combined with logos, meaning word, discourse, or reason.

Technology is an instrument, a system, extending human power and helping us adapt to changing conditions and needs. It evolves, requiring educated practitioners who produce and operate it: the technicians. But technology can also be viewed and defined in many other ways: as grassroots ingenuity, as decentralised shared knowledge, as morally embedded practice, as craft and civilizational achievement, as desacralised knowledge, as value-laden and culturally embedded, as collective intelligence and participatory knowledge, as a productive force, as accumulated civilisational ingenuity in harmony with nature, or as the structural integration of science, state, and industry.

I argue that, in essence, all technology is actually an expression of language and that language itself has a material, environmental/ecological substrate. It is not conjured up out of nothing.

Initially, for vulnerable human communities, language was extraordinarily referential and experiential. Survival depended on being aware and understanding the environment. In this sense, humans, animals, and plants all existed within a common indexical space. They become familiar with each other’s behaviours and adapt to them, deer selected for speed in response to predators, plants developing toxins in response to being eaten. This is coexistence.

For humans, over millions of years, language emerged to share information over distance: to coordinate hunting, defence, and survival, and to share skills. At this level, human technology does not diverge dramatically from animal behaviour. The bird’s nest and the human hut are both shelters. The beaver dam and the human irrigation system both manage water.

The difference between human technology and animal ‘technology’ was not one of kind, but one of degree; degree of symbolic complexity that human language makes possible. Language is the first technology because it is the first thing that humans possessed that fundamentally changed what it meant to be human. It is the meta-technology from which all other technologies emerge.

We tend to think of technology as beginning with the hand, with the tool, with the manipulation of clay, straw, stone, wood, bone, metals and so on. This mistakes effect for cause. The evolved human hand shaped what the evolved and embodied human mind could conceive, and the embodied human mind conceived best through the medium of language which, at first was heavily iconographic.

Language not only defines but also evokes; it helps us envision, hear, and sense our environment. Specific human languages enabled the kind of thinking that the specific technological innovation required: It was a response to a need that questioned: What if this were different? What if I combined these elements in a new way? What if I tried this instead of that? Language formulates and conceives of technology.

This is not a philosophical claim about the nature of technology; it is a claim about the role of language as a precondition for technological development.

Mathematics as Language

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Consider mathematics. Mathematics itself is a system of communication and its meanings are defined and written down in sequence. Writing, defining, communicating, these are characteristics of language, even if the language is given another name, venerated, formalised and specialised.

A mathematical proof is a narrative that guides the reader from premise to conclusion. Formal concepts are defined not by mathematics but ultimately by words. A proof unfolds in specialised vocabulary with its own formal grammar and scribal conventions. Mathematics, in other words, rests on a foundation of natural language. It is a specialised dialect refined for precision and rigour, but it remains fundamentally linguistic.

If a specific mathematics rests on language, and that mathematics is the foundation of a specific physics, and that specific physics is the foundation of specific engineered results, and engineering is the foundation of a technology of choice.

The chain of dependency is clear: language is used in certain ways by certain kinds of sentient and near-sentient beings associated together in societies, and language leads to certain kinds of mathematics, which leads to certain kinds of physics, which leads to certain kinds of engineering, which, in turn, leads to certain kinds of technology and not others.

This chain has implications. In a recent article by Ismaël Diadié Haïdara, he discussed how the mathematics Malian and some other African societies produced bypassed Platonism and went straight into the mathematics of complexity, a social evolutionary path truncated by later historical and political developments, perhaps. In other words, human knowledge has branches pruned by colonialism and power.

Environment Shapes Communication

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Different environments condition the formation of different languages and lexicons and different forms of communication, animal and human. Consider the following examples. Underwater environments cannot use airborne acoustic communication because sound behaves differently in water. Regions of constant dense mist cannot rely on visual signalling because vision is useless in fog. Underground environments may find chemical signalling more reliable than either sound or sight. Dense forests favour piercing tonal languages because pitch carries well through dense vegetation while high-frequency sounds are absorbed. Open plains allow larger vowel ranges because visual and acoustic signals can travel far in open spaces. Arid deserts produce rich spatial vocabularies because navigation is a matter of survival. Arctic conditions generate languages rich in terms to describe, define, and manipulate snow, wind, freezing water, and ice. In the mountains and hills, subdialects include yodelling and whistling.

These are not just interesting correlations; they are examples of the environment exerting selective pressure on communication systems. The environment does not merely constrain what can be communicated; it determines what communication channels are physically possible. Constraints act as filters on the space of all conceivable languages. They select for some possibilities and eliminate others. The result is not arbitrary; it is relatively predictable.

If a certain language is shaped by a certain environment, and a certain technology is shaped by that language, then that technology is ultimately also shaped by that specific environment. The possible tools that a sentient species develops are constrained, though not determined, by the concepts that its language makes available, and those concepts are constrained by the environment in which the species evolved.

In the spirit of the Drake Equation, this is a cascade of constraints, each layer narrowing the possibilities while leaving a huge amount of room for variation and difference: the world shapes the body, which shapes the senses, which shape the embodied mind, which shapes society, which shapes language, which shapes technology. In other words, ultimately, a world speaks its technology.

Earth as a Language Laboratory

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Consider the San people of the Kalahari. Their languages are rich in spatial vocabulary with absolute frames of reference, cardinal directions rather than relative terms like left and right, and they possess extraordinary memories for water sources and navigation. They have whistled languages that carry over long distances. Their technologies, water storage in ostrich eggs, poisoned arrows, lightweight portable shelter, reflect the constraints and opportunities of the desert environment.

The languages of savanna-dwelling peoples are rich in spatial deixis, motion verbs, and colour terms, as well as complex alarm call vocabularies that distinguish between different types of threats. Their technologies, stone tools, fire, metallurgy, reflect the constraints and opportunities of the savanna environment.

The languages of the Amazon are often tonal, with pitch carrying well through dense vegetation. Their technologies, blowguns, poisons, slash-and-burn agriculture, reflect the constraints and opportunities of the rainforest environment.

The languages of the Arctic are rich in terms for snow, ice, and wind, terms that are essential for survival in a harsh environment where subtle distinctions in snow conditions can mean the difference between life and death. Their technologies, igloos, kayaks, harpoons, reflect the constraints and opportunities of the Arctic environment.

An environment-first evolutionary view of language, that understands that given more (and less) cooperative societies different languages and subsequently technologies emerge, has important implications in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

These examples demonstrate that Earth is not a single data point, but that it is a kind of laboratory of multiple worlds; each biome a parallel evolutionary arena where life is tested. Different environments generate different forms of communication and material culture. The framework can be tested against these data points. If the framework is correct, it should be able to predict some of the features of languages and technologies from the features of environments. And if it can do that, it can be extended beyond Earth, suggesting new types of techno-signatures.

If technology requires language, and if language is shaped by environment, then the technological possibilities available to an alien civilisation are constrained by the environmental conditions in which their language evolved. To understand what technology an alien civilisation might develop, we must first understand what language they might speak, and to understand their language, we must understand their environment.

[And as an aside, if we are to understand the ontology of technology, we must recognise that language itself is a technology. There is a technology of language, a way of working on, creating, and manufacturing language to shape society, objectives, and strategies. This conscious articulation of language is a source of real power because it opens up new possibilities for thought and world-building.]

Given a particular environment, we can predict some of the features of the language that will emerge, and from those linguistic features, we can predict some of the features of the technology that will emerge. This is not scientific in a falsifiable Popperian sense, it is suggestive; a creative way to go about generating and uncovering more hypotheses about alien civilisations and their possible techno-signatures.

A New Equation

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To ‘operationalise’ this intuition, we can formalise the relationship between environment, language, technology, and detectable signals. In a way that stresses the contingent, layered nature of technological development. The core of the Drake equation becomes:

P(Detect) = P(E) × P(L|E) × P(T|L,E) × P(D|T,E)

Where:

Term	Meaning
P(E) : Environmental Permissibility	The probability that a planet’s thermodynamic, atmospheric, and chemical profile permits an information-dense communication channel
P(L|E) : Linguistic Emergence	The conditional probability that an embodied intelligence develops symbolic or indexical representation optimised for channel E
P(T|L,E) : Technological Manifestation	The probability that the linguistic conceptual space yields physical tools capable of environmental manipulation within local energy constraints
P(D|T,E) : Observational Match	The probability that human search instruments overlap with the signal’s specific modality, frequency, spatial location, and temporal window

The full version of the equation works like this: every term is a probability that comes from studying the physical conditions of the planet first. The problem is that we do not yet have instruments accurate and powerful enough to measure these conditions.

So, the first step is to ask, “What are the physical and chemical conditions that would shape the kind of communication system that could emerge?” Once we know what a planet is like, how its atmosphere blocks or lets through light, how sound travels through its oceans, what sources of energy are available, what chemicals are present, we can work out which ways of communicating are physically possible as a first step.

Going back again to earth as a laboratory, an exoplanet (or much of it) wrapped in thick, fast-moving haze would make visual signals useless beyond a few metres. Chemical signals and low-frequency sound would work better. A world with liquid methane at extremely cold temperatures would slow down chemical reactions, so creatures there might rely on light produced by living things or on sensing electrical and magnetic fields. Squid use light to signal on earth. A deep ocean under a thick layer of ice would trap high-frequency light and chemical signals in small areas, but sound could travel for thousands of kilometres. The environment does not just limit the options; it constrains which forms of communication can work at all. We can begin by calculating which signalling methods could survive under these ocean ice world conditions.

The second step is: we do not ask, “What technology would the aliens’ language allow?” (and it could be a wide variety) but “What technologies could exist given the senses and ways of thinking that different environments would create?”

If a species senses the world mainly through electrical fields in a dark ocean, it will understand electromagnetism long before it ever discovers light. If there is no oxygen in the air, fire will never exist, so their entire path of technological development, metalworking, energy production, will be completely different from ours. If thick clouds permanently cover the sky, they may never see the stars, so astronomy may never develop. Their technology will grow without any knowledge of the universe beyond their own world.

The third step asks: what visible traces would these environment-specific technologies leave behind? Living things engineering on a planetary scale might change the atmosphere in ways that look natural to us. Modulated beams of atoms would leave no trace in the electromagnetic spectrum. Controlling heat output would show up as organised, non-random changes in how the planet gives off heat.

This step connects the invisible, thought and language, to things we can actually observe, but only if we build our models from the ground up, starting with the physics of that specific world, not with a blunderbuss approach.

TRAPPIST-1e

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To show how this might work in practice, imagine a planet like TRAPPIST-1e. This planet is tidally locked, which means one side always faces its star and the other side always faces away. There is permanent day on one side, permanent night on the other, and a narrow “twilight zone” band in between.

On a world like this, the single most important feature of the environment is the light gradient, the difference between the blazing hot side and the freezing cold side. The point directly under the star never moves. The point on the far side never moves either. This creates a fixed, planet-wide sense of direction. It is not like our north, south, east, and west, which are human inventions. It is a real, physical feature of the world that would shape how any creature living there experiences space.

Because the words a language uses for direction reflect the physical layout of the environment, any intelligent species native to TRAPPIST-1e would not think in terms of “left” and “right” or “north” and “south.” Instead, their sense of direction would be connected to the distance from the unmoving star and the position along the twilight zone.

Words for direction would be based on heat and light rather than points on a compass. A word for “that way” could be broken down into three parts: the pull toward or away from the star, the movement of heat in the atmosphere, and the sideways push caused by the planet’s rotation.

If the heat pattern is a message rather than just weather, we can separate it into the natural background and the added signal. The atmosphere along the twilight zone is much more stable than the stormy day side or the frozen night side. This makes it the best place for sending signals across the whole planet. A civilisation could use this stable band to broadcast information by controlling its heat output. The light given off along the twilight zone could be modelled as a combination of the surface temperature, the atmosphere, and any deliberate changes made to the heat signal.

This leads to testable predictions. A natural atmosphere produces a smooth, predictable pattern of heat and light. An artificial signal would show three particular signs: the heat pattern would show sharp, regular spikes at specific scales rather than the smooth, random spread of natural noise,  the pattern would be evenly matched across the planet, suggesting a coordinated network, rather than being unevenly shifted by winds. and the signal would be strongest exactly where the difference between hot and cold is greatest, rather than being unrelated to the planet’s basic geography.

The key test for an artificial signal would be that the radiation becomes more organised over time and that the link between the signal and the planet’s light gradient is stronger than anything natural processes could produce.

Venus and Mars are Alright Tonight

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We can use this same framework to look at strange findings in our own solar system. It offers new ways of thinking about things that have puzzled scientists for years.

Venus has a deadly, crushing surface, but more moderate temperatures up in its cloud layers. Any possible way of communicating there would face serious limits. Sound travels strangely in the thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, so using sound to communicate would be hard. The clouds are dense and constantly churning, so using sight would also be difficult. But chemicals released into the atmosphere can stay there for hours or even days, forming a complex chemical pattern in the clouds. Maybe chemical communication is the answer.

The phosphine mystery in Venus’s atmosphere is a good example. Phosphine is a chemical that should not survive long in Venus’s harsh, oxygen-rich air, yet it is there. Scientists have suggested it might come from some unknown volcanic process. However, our framework asks a different question: what if phosphine is a sign of life? Or a sign of technology? Or a message?

The framework gives us specific things to test. The phosphine should be spread out in an organised pattern, not randomly scattered. Its changes over time should look like information being sent, not just background noise. It should connect with other trace gases in ways that suggest deliberate planning rather than chance.

This could apply to methane on mars. The methane in the Martian atmosphere is real. It appears in specific places, changes with the seasons, and has not been fully explained. On Earth, ninety per cent of methane comes from living things. On Mars, it could be a waste product from microbes living underground, a chemical used for signalling, or even a technology, a controlled release as part of underground engineering. These are ideas to be tested.

Broadening the Search

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This framework has practical consequences for how we search. We need high-resolution atmospheric spectroscopy to understand the physical conditions of alien planets; sensitive chemical mapping to spot non-random patterns in trace gases; statistical tools to identify patterns that go against disorder in planetary data and thermal imaging to detect organised changes in how a planet gives off heat.

The framework also requires us to build libraries of environmental models, simulate how information could be sent under different physical conditions, and explore what signatures non-human technologies might leave behind. This is a huge computational task, but it is the only way to systematically explore all the possibilities. Once we have the right tools, instead of looking for alien technology like radio signals or giant structures, we could look for signs of intelligent activity written into a planet’s natural patterns, like its heat or weather.

A lifeless planet follows predictable physical rules and produces random, high-entropy noise. In contrast, a planet with intelligent life would actively organise that energy, reducing entropy and embedding information into its thermal glow as an expression of the ways in which its denizens communicate, languages which, in turn are instantiated in technologies.

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Phil Hall was born in South Africa into an ANC family with British, French, Austrian, and German roots. After his parents were exiled, they lived in East Africa and India before returning overland to the UK. In the UK he studied Russian and Spanish literature, politics, and economics. After graduating he specialised in descriptive and applied linguistics. Phil has lived and worked in Spain, the USSR, Mexico and the Gulf. Returning to London during the pandemic, he co-founded the Humane Socialist magazine, Ars Notoria (the Art of the Noteworthy) and the micropublisher, AN Editions.