About this product

Life and Language Beyond Earth

Have you ever wondered whether we are alone in the universe, or if life forms on other planets might exist? If they do exist, how might their languages have evolved? Could we ever understand them, and indeed learn to communicate with them? This highly original, thought-provoking book takes us on a fascinating journey over billions of years, from the formation of galaxies and solar systems, to the appearance of planets in the habitable zones of their parent stars, and then to how biology and, ultimately, human life arose on our own planet. It delves into how our brains and our language developed, in order to explore the likelihood of communication beyond Earth and whether it would evolve along similar lines. In the process, fascinating insights from the fields of astronomy, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neuroscience and linguistics are uncovered, shedding new light on life as we know it on Earth, and beyond.

Contents

How to use this book

Part I. Introduction
1. Approaching the topic
2. Looking beyond Earth
3. Striving to understand

Part II. The Universe We Live In
4. Trying to grasp size
5. Star formation and planets
6. The likelihood of life
7. Possible conditions on an exoplanet?
8. How and where to look for exolife
9. The limits of exploration
10. Assessing probabilities

Part III. Our Story on Earth
11. The slow path of evolution
12. How does the whole work?
13. The road to Homo sapiens
14. The rise of human societies

Part IV. The Runaway Brain
15. The brain-to-body ratio
16. How brains develop
17. Our cognition
18. Consciousness
19. Artificial intelligence

Part V. Language, our Greatest Gift
20. Looking at language
21. Talking about language
22. The view from linguistics
23. The language faculty and languages
24. Language and the brain
25. Acquiring language
26. Humans and animals

Part VI. Life and Language, Here and Beyond
27. Preconditions for life
28. What might exolife be like?
29. Looking for signs of life
30. The issue of first contact
31. Language beyond Earth
32. How human language arose
33. The language of exobeings
34. Looking forward: the basic questions again
35. Some final thoughts

Appendixes
Glossaries
Timelines

About the author

Raymond Hickey is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland and a former Professor at the University of Duisburg and Essen, Germany. His main research interests are varieties of English, language contact, variation and change and issues in phonology. Some of his recent publications include Listening to the Past (2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (2017), English in Multilingual South Africa (2020) and The Handbook of Language Contact (2020).

Specifications

Pm Supplier	CUP/ Cambridge University Press
Pm Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Pm Isbn 10	100922641X
Pm Isbn 13	9781009226417
Pm Publication Date	2023-09-21
Pm Width	160
Pm Height	43
Pm Author	Hickey,Raymond
Pm Longness	236

Author: Hickey,Raymond
Page Count: 695
Publication Date: 2023-09-21