Mathematics Explored as Basis for Universal Communication, Supported by Terrestrial Interspecies Research

Challenges in Interspecies Communication

Communication between species, particularly across interstellar distances, faces significant challenges due to the absence of shared languages. For instance, the nearest known star system is 4.4 light-years away, implying that a round-trip communication could take over a decade. A proposed method for addressing this challenge involves the use of mathematics as a potential universal language.

Historical and Fictional Precedents

The concept of mathematics as a universal language has historical roots. In the 17th century, Galileo Galilei described the universe as a grand book "written in the language of mathematics."

Science fiction has also explored this idea through various narratives:

• Contact (1985 novel, 1997 film): Depicts extraterrestrials communicating with humans via repeating sequences of prime numbers.
• The Three-Body Problem (novel by Liu Cixin, adapted into a Netflix series): Features interspecies communication to solve a mathematical problem within a video game.
• Story of Your Life (1998 novella by Ted Chiang, adapted into the 2016 film Arrival): Describes aliens with a non-linear experience of time and a correspondingly different formulation of mathematics.

Real-World Efforts in Interstellar Communication

Actual scientific efforts aimed at universal communication have incorporated mathematical principles and numbers:

• Voyager Golden Records (1977): The covers of these records, launched with the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, are etched with mathematical and physical quantities intended to convey information about Earth to extraterrestrials.
• Arecibo Message (1974): This radio message, transmitted into space, consisted of 1,679 binary digits arranged to communicate numbers and the atomic numbers of elements composing DNA.
• 2022 Binary Language Research: Researchers developed a binary language designed to introduce extraterrestrials to human mathematics, chemistry, and biology.

Terrestrial Analogue: Honeybee Mathematical Abilities

Honeybees serve as a terrestrial model for examining interspecies communication due to their evolutionary divergence from humans over 600 million years ago. Despite significant differences in brain structure and size, both humans and bees exhibit communication, sociality, and some mathematical capabilities. Honeybees, for example, communicate the location of food sources through a "waggle dance" that conveys distance, direction, angle from the Sun, and resource quality.

Bee Mathematics Experiments (2016-2024)

Experiments conducted with freely flying honeybees between 2016 and 2024 explored their ability to learn mathematics. During these tests, bees demonstrated several mathematical capacities:

• Solving simple addition and subtraction problems.
• Categorizing quantities as odd or even.
• Ordering quantities of items, including an understanding of "zero."
• Linking symbols with numbers.

These findings indicate that bees possess a rudimentary mathematical capacity, including the ability to add or subtract one, which provides a theoretical basis for representing natural numbers.

Implications for a Universal Language

The observation that two evolutionarily distant species—humans and honeybees—can perform mathematical operations supports the hypothesis that mathematics could form the basis of a universal language. This research suggests that extraterrestrial species with sufficiently sophisticated brains might also possess mathematical capabilities.

Further research is required to determine whether different intelligent species would develop varying approaches to mathematics, analogous to dialects in human language. Such discoveries could contribute to answering whether mathematics is solely a human construct or an inherent consequence of intelligence, making it universal.