What Language Will We Speak in Space, on Mars and Beyond?
In the spirit of February’s massively successful maiden SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch, I wanted to throw together a short mini-post about space and language.
Before we get into the languagey stuff, I feel like I need to briefly explain what’s going on.
On Tuesday Feb 6th, entrepreneur billionaire Elon Musk’s private space launch company SpaceX launched its biggest (so far) rocket – the Falcon Heavy – on its first test flight and the world was pretty much in awe.
It’s success could usher in a new era of heavy lift rockets that could eventually help people leave Earth’s orbit – something nobody has really done since the Apollo Program’s lunar landings ended in the early 70s. The “test” payload (because you never launch something truly valuable like a satellite on a brand new rocket) is Musk’s personal “midnight cherry red” Tesla sportscar. It has been launched roughly towards the orbit of Mars.
1<—-Click for candy
Thankfully it didn’t explode – we weren’t sure.
SpaceX’s ultimate goal is to put over a million people on Mars by the end of the century. It sounds a bit crazy at first glance, but superblogger Tim Urban outlines extremely well 2how this is supposed to work, and it’s pretty inspiring. I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in this stuff and have about 2 hours to read one of the most epic blog articles in history.
I’m not going to get into too many details about how, why, when, etc, because you didn’t come here for SpaceX, you came here for languages:
So:
What language do they speak on the ISS right now?
Anyway, for the time being, and since the 70s, humans have been stuck in low Earth orbit (LEO), namely inhabiting the International Space Station (ISS).
Cosmonauts 3and astronauts not only undergo extreme physical and mental training, they’re also more or less required to speak Russian. While the lingua franca of the ISS is English, and all astronauts are required to speak it no matter which country they’re from, they also need to be capable of speaking Russian at least relatively well.4
This is due to several factors, the largest of which is almost definitely that American and other non-Russian space-faring folks can only really launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan – leased by the Russian government’s aerospace program Roscosmos.5 This means that astronauts almost always launch with Russians, are in Russia, or need to get around (bilingual) Russian speaking Kazakhstan.
If you’ve ever been to Russia you know how important it is to be able to speak their language, and due to safety concerns and the somewhat high-risk technology involved, it really helps to be able to communicate and understand people. So Russian is part of the deal.
Yelena Kirilenko – the head of the Russian language group at Roscosmos’ cosmonaut training center outlined in an interview with Russia Beyond why it’s important for foreign astronauts to speak the language. She states that a Russian captain is always in charge of the launch, but that another astronaut – usually American – is the “co-pilot” and must be able to communicate at an “intermediate-high” level. All of these co-pilot astronauts traveling to the ISS with the Russian program are required to pass an ACTFL test, which is the US government’s Russian fluency exam.
Once they get there it’s all English, but during the launch this is all about safety and teamwork. You fly with Russians, you play by their rules, and you speak their language. Simple.
The third crew member (there are typically three people launched at a time) is not required to speak Russian, but when you’re almost guaranteed to float around in a space station with Russians for weeks or months at a time, it never hurts.
But what about beyond?
What language will we speak on Mars and elsewhere?
This is where things get more interesting.
At the moment, the world’s heavyweights in space exploration are from the US, Russia, the ESA, and China. 550 people have been to space since Russia’s Yuri Gagarin became the first person to make it up there in 1961, from 38 countries. The US and Russia kind of hold a monopoly on this6, with 337 of those space travelers being from the United States and 118 from Russia or the Soviet Union.
As I mentioned before, SpaceX is expected to become the next human-capable launch entity, and they’ve got some seriously lofty goals. Without getting into the details of that, and ignoring the billion things that could go wrong, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they do make it to Mars, and they do set up a colony, and they do eventually get their magic million people settled and working together.
What the heck will they speak?
Honestly, it’ll probably be English at first. Since that’s already what they speak on the ISS, and given that it’s a US company, I think that kind of goes without saying.
But there’s no way that every single one of those million people will be American, and there’s no telling whether other space companies or space-faring nations7 will set up their own colonies or work together on that one.
What happens when you cram a million people from all over the planet who speak who knows how many languages?
You get something new, eventually, probably.
They probably won’t just create their own new language, it’ll be an interesting process of assimilation and language borrowing, but I predict that they’ll eventually end up speaking something entirely different. I think we’ll see this assimilation take place at a noticeably rapid rate. By this I mean years rather than dozens of years. I think when you build a multinational society from essentially nothing this is simply what comes of it, and I am absolutely hopping to find out.
The reason Musk wants to lob a million people to Mars is because he believes that that’s the number we need to have in order to create a totally sustainable population that could then grow on its own accord and no longer rely on Earth for further support. Should this happen you will see what is effectively a new nation appear – a nation comprised of people from countless Earth nations.
I predict that if all goes well, it will become its own kind of melting pot society and Standard Martian will rise from the regolith.
This all sounds like sci-fi, I know, but for now we’re just talking in hypotheticals. I’ve named the language Standard Martian because I felt like it and it’s easy to understand.
The really cool thing is that if this all works out, our children or grandchildren could see the birth of an entirely new language smashed together from the ashes of who knows how many others. There would be Martian-Earth interpreters managing inter-planetary business and trade deals. We’d have to create some sort of new spacey version of the United Nations, and there would be all sorts of cool new possibilities for linguists, translators, interpreters, and other people…
What language will we speak in space in the distant future?
It’s virtually impossible to accurately predict what happens next. Assuming all goes well it is likely that humanity would go on to explore deeper into the solar system and set up colonies on places like some of Jupiter or Saturn’s moons. Perhaps cloud cities on Venus, asteroid mining rigs, who really knows?
One thing is for absolute certain though, if humanity doesn’t manage to destroy itself – and that’s a big if – eventually we’ll have to leave the solar system because the Sun will murder us all.8
This could be done who knows how many ways, but it’d probably involve some sort of stupidly large generational ship, or other fancy futuristic propulsion. And it’d probably take hundreds or thousands of years to get anywhere new. That means these ships would effectively be new societies.
And what do we know happens with languages when left to their own devices for hundreds or thousands of years? They become unrecognizable.
If you went back to 12th century England and started chatting up the peasants9 there is no way that they’d predict that their language would effectively be indecipherable 900 years later. Likewise, I find it extraordinarily unlikely that 21st century humans would understand a word of what we’ll speak in the year 3,000.
Furthermore, since we’ve established that the future, or even the present, of space travel is and is going to almost definitely remain multinational, we won’t just be dealing with an island of English speaking peasants. There will be Chinese speakers, Japanese speakers, German speakers, Spanish speakers, Swahili speakers, and who knows what else. If you think globalization is expediting the evolution of languages right now, just wait and see what happens when we’re all living and working together in the distant future on other planets and other star systems, or whatever.
It’s going to be heaven on Earth – figuratively speaking, because, you know, space – for linguists, and I may not be alive to see it, but it’s super inspiring to think about, and I am absurdly excited to see what does happen in my lifetime.
Because I’m a dork and I love you all:
Okay, so it didn’t really stay a “mini” post. I live for this crap and I’m easily carried away, sorry.
Anyway, I live streamed the launch here on LATG as it happened, but since it’s over all I can do is toss in the footage.
Oh, did I mention that SpaceX’s calling card is landing their boosters? Just watch:
What do you think we’ll be speaking in 100 years, 500 years, or further? Leave a comment below with your thoughts!
tiny edit August 2018* Musk is being a bit of a dick to people right now, so I’m a bit mad at him. I really hope he stops. Sucks when heroes let you down. That is all.
Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. Potentially a necromancer. All typos are my own.
