Studying how honeybees process information may help humans communicate with aliens, according to a new thought experiment.
Although the ancestors of honeybees and humans diverged in evolution more than 600 million years ago, the species retained common traits like sociality, communication, and some mathematical ability.
Studies show that despite their tiny insect brains bees can solve simple addition and subtraction problems and even categorise quantities as odd or even. They may even possess some understanding of the concept of zero.
On the basis of these observations, researchers ask whether mathematics can be used for communication with extraterrestrial beings.
If bees can grasp mathematical concepts, they reason, then those ideas are unlikely to be dependent on human language. Not least because bees, unlike mammals like macaques or dolphins, are one of the farthest species in terms of evolution from humans to possess mathematical ability.
“If two species considered alien to each other – humans and honeybees – can perform mathematics, along with many other animals, then perhaps mathematics could form the basis of a universal language,” researchers argue in an article in The Conversation.
The thought experiment, published in the journal Leonardo, hinges on the philosophical idea that mathematics is much more than a descriptive tool that humans use to explain the universe.
By being an objective structure that exists independently of humans, researchers say, math can serve as a basis for communication beyond the Earth, especially with aliens.
Even if the sensory perceptions or biological forms of extraterrestrial beings differ drastically from those of humans, some mathematical structures can provide a common ground for communication, they say.
The idea isn’t entirely new. Past scientific efforts at communication with extraterrestrial beings also used mathematics and numbers.
For instance, the Golden Records sent on Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, launched in 1977, were etched with mathematical quantities to “communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials”.
“If there are extraterrestrial species, and they have sufficiently sophisticated brains, then our work suggests they may have the capacity to do mathematics,” researchers say.
They now hope to research whether different species develop different approaches to mathematics similar to dialects in language.