A new study theorizes that mathematics could be the universal language that will allow us to communicate with extraterrestrials. The hypothesis was tested with bees, which serve as an alien insect model.
Humans have always been fascinated by Space. We often question whether we are alone in the universe. Otherwise, what would intelligent life be like? And how would aliens communicate?
The possibility of extraterrestrial life is based on scientific evidence. But the distances involved in traveling between the stars are immense. If we come into contact with aliens, it will likely be through long-distance communication, given that our nearest neighboring star is 4.4 light years away. Even if they are optimistic, it would probably be necessary more than ten years for any back and forth communication.
How would this be possible if we don’t have a common language? Well, consider how we can interact with creatures here on Earth with minds very different from ours: bees.
Despite the great differences between human and bee brains, we are both capable of performing mathematical calculations. A new paper published in Leonardo magazine argues that our mental experiment reinforces the idea that mathematics can constitute the basis for a “universal language”which could one day be used for communication between the stars.
Mathematics as the language of science
The idea of mathematics as universal is not new. In the 17th century, Galileo Galilei described the universe as a great book “written in the language of mathematics”.
Science fiction has also long explored the idea of mathematics as a universal language. In the 1985 novel and 1997 film Contact, aliens communicate with humans using a repeating sequence of prime numbers sent via a radio signal.
In The Three-Body Problem, a novel by Liu Cixin adapted into a Netflix series, communication between aliens and humans to solve a mathematical problem occurs through a video game.
Mathematics also appears in Ted Chiang’s 1998 novel The Story of Your Life, which was adapted into the 2016 film First Encounter. It describes aliens with a non-linear experience of time and a correspondingly different mathematical formulation.
Real scientific efforts toward universal communication also involved mathematics and numbers. The covers of the Golden Records, which accompanied the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes launched in 1977, contain mathematical and physical quantities recorded for “communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials“.
The Arecibo radio message, transmitted into space in 1974, consisted of 1679 zeros and ones, ordered to communicate the numbers from one to ten and the atomic numbers of the elements that make up DNA. In 2022, researchers developed a binary language designed to introduce human mathematics, chemistry and biology to extraterrestrials.
How to test a universal language without aliens?
A creature with two antennae, six legs and five eyes may sound like an alien, but also describes a bee. (Science fiction, of course, has already imagined “insectoid” aliens.)
The ancestors of bees and humans diverged more than 600 million years ago, but we both possess communication, sociability and some mathematical ability. Since separating, both bees and humans have independently developed effective but distinct means of communication and cooperation in complex societies.
Humans developed language. Bees have developed the waggle dance, which communicates the location of food sources, including distance, direction, angle to the Sun, and quality of the resource.
Due to our vast evolutionary separation from bees, as well as differences in the size and structure of our brains, bees could be considered a alien insect model that exists right here on Earth. At least for the purposes of our thought experiment.
Bees and mathematics
In a series of experiments between 2016 and 2024, the authors explored the bees’ ability to learn mathematics. They worked with free-flying bees who chose to regularly visit and participate in outdoor math tests to receive sugar water.
During the tests, the bees demonstrated the ability to solve simple additions and subtractionscategorize quantities as odd or even and order quantities of items, including understanding the concept of “zero”. Bees also demonstrated the ability to associate symbols with numbers, in a simplified version of how humans learn Arabic and Roman numerals.
Despite bees’ tiny brains, they have demonstrated a rudimentary ability to perform mathematical calculations and learn to solve problems with quantities. His math skills involved learning to add and subtract one, which provides a foundation for more abstract mathematics. The ability to add or subtract one theoretically allows bees to represent all natural numbers.
If two species considered alien to each other – humans and bees – can perform mathematical calculations, as can many other animals, then perhaps mathematics could be the answer. basis of a universal language.
If there are extraterrestrial species with sufficiently sophisticated brains, the new work suggests they may have the ability to perform mathematical calculations. Another question to answer is whether different species will develop different approaches to mathematics, similar to dialects in a language.
Such discoveries would also help to answer the question of whether mathematics is an entirely human construction or whether it is a consequence of intelligence and, therefore, universal.
