Life and Language Beyond Earth

Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland and 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).

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.