By day, Dr John Elliott is a professor in Computing and Creative Technologies at Leeds Metropolitan University.

But by night, his work takes on a more out-of-this-world nature – he’s devising the methods we'll need to talk to aliens.

Creating algorithms that can break down and understand languages on Earth, he says we could one day use his system to decode an extraterrestrial message

To first approach the topic, Dr Elliott began studying about 60 different languages on Earth.

Looking at structure and the frequency of certain words he created a set of algorithms that, when applied to different languages, revealed their similarities.

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