John Bohlinger’s Last Call: Do Aliens Dream of Electric Guitars?

Is music the galactic language? Our columnist contemplates breaking down even the most far-out barriers with the power of song.In the 2015 animated film Home, the heroine, voiced by Rihanna, plays Rihanna’s “Dancing in the Dark” for Oh, an affable alien whose tribe, the Boov, have overtaken the world. Oh hates the song, claiming it’s “not even music.” Yet, as the beat hits, his body betrays him, twitching and gyrating to the groove. Oh cries, “You have tricked me into listening to a debilitating sonic weapon. I am not in control of my own extremities!” It’s a cartoon, sure, but it nails a truth: Music, whether you’re human or Boov, grabs you by the soul—or at least the hips.
Play the first few bars of Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good” or AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and bodies move—doesn’t matter if it’s Tokyo, Nashville, or a yurt in Mongolia. This is not an exclusively human response. We can see both domesticated and wild animals move to music. Even plants, without the benefit of ears or a nervous system, respond to music.
So if music is the international language of Earth, what about beyond our planet? Just a few years ago, if you admitted you believed in alien life, the general public would act like you were crazy. But in these James-Webb-Telescope, Space-Force days, most agree that there is probably a whole lot outside of our little rock. That being established, one has to ask: Will life forms outside our world dig “Bohemian Rhapsody?”
Here’s the rub: Space is silent. Sound needs a medium—air, water, something—in which to travel. Space is a vacuum, so your Marshall stack’s wail dies before it leaves the stratosphere. But sound isn’t totally absent out there. In rare spots, like plasma clouds or planetary atmospheres, vibrations can carry. But even if the vibrations carry, is there anything or anyone there, and do they have ears?
Humans hear sound through ears tuned to 20–20,000 Hz, but some theorize aliens might sense sound differently—not through ears but via skin, picking up vibrations like a cosmic bass drop. That’s not much of a stretch when you consider that plants in lab experiments respond to music via cells called mechanoreceptors, growing faster when serenaded with Mozart. If ferns can vibe, why not E.T.?Still, there’s no proof aliens have music or the brains to make it. Their sensory organs might be so alien that our 440 Hz-tuned melodies sound like static. Imagine a species evolved in a vacuum, communicating through light pulses like fireflies or electric fields like sharks. Or, if aliens have mastered sound waves to move pyramids or carve Petra in Jordan (as some fringe theories suggest), they might scoff at our use of music to shake our asses rather than build complex architecture.“If ferns can vibe, why not E.T.?”But here’s where it gets wild. Sound might not just be vibes—it could carry mass. A 2019 Scientific American article dropped a mind-bender: Phonons, the particles of sound, may have a tiny negative mass, like a hydrogen atom. In water, these phonons fall upward against gravity at a measly 1 degree over 15 kilometers. It’s barely measurable, but it hints at sound’s untapped power. If aliens use sonic waves to teleport (as abduction stories claim), time travel, or levitate stones, our Spotify playlists might seem like cave paintings to their sonic tech.
Yet, primitive or not, music hits us where it counts. It’s emotional, instinctual, universal. When Oh dances despite himself, it’s a reminder that music bypasses the brain and goes straight for the gut. That’s why we’ve sent it to the stars with the Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977 with Voyager 1. Curated by Carl Sagan, it’s two copies of a gold-plated LP carrying Earth’s greatest hits: Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Bulgarian folk music, Senegalese percussion, even whale songs. Sagan called it a “bottle into the cosmic ocean,” a hopeful bet that advanced aliens might spin it and get us. In 2008, NASA beamed the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” toward Polaris at 186,000 miles per second. Yoko Ono called it the dawn of interplanetary communication. And Vangelis’ Mythodea soundtracked NASA’s 2001 Mars mission, because nothing says cosmic like a synth symphony.
So, are we naive to think music’s our galactic handshake? Maybe. Aliens might hear “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and think it’s a distress signal. Or they might have no concept of melody, their culture built on silent pulses we can’t fathom. But I’m with Sagan—there’s hope in the attempt. Music’s our best shot because it’s us at our rawest: joy, pain, love, all distilled into a riff or a chord. If aliens don’t get that, they’re missing out.Maybe music’s not the galactic language—maybe it’s just ours. But if it makes us dance, cry, or feel alive, that’s enough. Here’s to the last call, when the amps are off, but the song’s still ringing in your bones. Raise a glass to the hope that somewhere, out there, an alien’s tapping its foot.