Throughout history, humanity has harboured a profound curiosity about the cosmos. We often ponder our solitude in the grand expanse of the Universe. If we are not alone, what form might intelligent life assume? And by what means would such entities converse?
The potential for life beyond Earth is underpinned by empirical observations. However, the interstellar distances present formidable challenges for physical transit. Should contact with alien civilizations occur, it would most likely transpire through long-distance communication, given that our closest stellar neighbour is 4.4 light-years distant.
Even under the most optimistic projections, a reciprocal exchange of information could consume over a decade.
How, then, might such an exchange be feasible without any shared linguistic framework? Consider, for a moment, our interactions with beings on our own planet whose cognitive processes are vastly dissimilar to our own: bees.
Notwithstanding the significant disparities between human and bee neural architecture, both species demonstrate a capacity for mathematical reasoning. As explicated in a recent publication in the journal Leonardo, our conceptual exploration reinforces the hypothesis that mathematics could serve as the foundational element of a “universal language,” potentially facilitating communication across interstellar gulfs.
Mathematics: The Omnipresent Vernacular of Science
The notion of mathematics as a universal language is by no means novel. In the 17th century, Galileo Galilei characterized the cosmos as an enormous tome “written in the idiom of mathematics.”
The realm of speculative fiction has also long delved into the concept of mathematics as a lingua franca. The 1985 novel and subsequent 1997 film Contact depict extraterrestrials initiating contact with humanity through a patterned sequence of prime numbers transmitted via radio waves.
In Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem, which has been adapted into a Netflix series, communication between alien entities and humans to resolve a mathematical conundrum is facilitated through a video game interface.
Mathematics also plays a pivotal role in Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella, Story of Your Life, the source material for the 2016 film Arrival. This narrative portrays aliens who perceive time non-linearly, exhibiting a correspondingly divergent framework for mathematical principles.
Actual scientific endeavours aimed at achieving universal communication have similarly incorporated mathematical and numerical principles. The exterior surfaces of the Golden Records, which were affixed to the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes launched in 1977, bear engraved mathematical and physical constants intended to “convey the narrative of our world to extraterrestrial beings.”
The 1974 Arecibo radio message, dispatched into the cosmos, comprised 1,679 binary digits meticulously arranged to represent the cardinal numbers and the atomic constituents of DNA. More recently, in 2022, researchers formulated a binary lexicon designed to familiarize extraterrestrials with human mathematics, chemistry, and biology.
Validating a Universal Language in the Absence of Extraterrestrials
An organism possessing two antennae, six appendages, and five ocular organs might evoke images of an alien, yet it precisely describes a bee. (Indeed, science fiction has often envisioned “insectoid” extraterrestrials.)
The ancestral lineage from which bees and humans diverged dates back over 600 million years. Despite this profound evolutionary separation, both species exhibit forms of communication, social organization, and a degree of mathematical proficiency. Since their evolutionary divergence, both honeybees and humans have independently devised effective, albeit distinct, methodologies for interaction and collaborative efforts within intricate societal structures.
Human societies have developed sophisticated linguistic systems. Honeybees, conversely, evolved the waggle dance – a complex communicative behaviour that conveys information regarding the spatial location of sustenance sources, including their proximity, bearing relative to the sun, and nutritional value.
Given the immense temporal and evolutionary chasm separating us from bees, coupled with significant differences in their brain morphology and size, bees can be conceptualized as an analogue for an insectoid alien, existing right here within our terrestrial biosphere. This analogy proves particularly useful for our present thought experiment.
Investigating the Mathematical Aptitude of Bees
In a series of experimental investigations conducted between 2016 and 2024, our research team explored the innate mathematical capabilities of bees. We engaged with freely foraging honeybees that voluntarily participated in our outdoor mathematical assessments in exchange for a sucrose solution reward.
Throughout these experimental protocols, the bees exhibited demonstrable evidence of performing basic arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction. They were also observed to correctly classify quantities as either odd or even, and to order sets of items based on their magnitude, exhibiting an understanding of the numerical concept of “zero.” Furthermore, bees even displayed the capacity to associate abstract symbols with numerical values, mirroring, in a simplified manner, the process by which humans acquire numeral systems like Arabic and Roman.
Notwithstanding their diminutive cranial capacity, bees have exhibited a foundational competence in performing mathematical operations and acquiring problem-solving skills involving numerical quantities. Their mathematical aptitude encompassed the learning of addition and subtraction of unity, providing a conceptual gateway to more abstract mathematical concepts. The capacity to increment or decrement by one theoretically enables bee populations to represent the entire spectrum of natural numbers.
If two species considered highly dissimilar – humans and honeybees – can engage in mathematical reasoning, alongside numerous other animal species, then it is plausible that mathematics could indeed form the bedrock of a universal form of communication.
Should extraterrestrial civilizations exist and possess adequately advanced cognitive faculties, our research suggests they might possess a comparable predisposition for undertaking mathematical endeavours. A subsequent inquiry would then be whether distinct species might develop divergent approaches to mathematics, analogous to linguistic dialects.
Such discoveries would also contribute significantly to resolving the enduring question of whether mathematics is an exclusively human construct or rather an inherent consequence of intelligence, thus rendering it a universal phenomenon.
