The ‘universal language’ that could let us speak to aliens: Researchers reveal the best way to communicate with extraterrestrial life

A group of Australian scientists have revealed how we may be able to learn to speak with aliens, and the answer is found right here on Earth.

If we do make contact with extraterrestrial life, it will likely require sending messages across vast distances of interstellar space.

The question for astronomers looking out for distant civilisations is how this communication would even be possible if we don’t share a language.

Now, scientists say we might be able to develop a ‘universal language’ with an unlikely inspiration: The humble honeybee.

With six legs, five eyes, and a radically different social structure, scientists say that bees are among the closest things we have to aliens here on Earth.

Although humans and bees have wildly different brains, we have both evolved complex methods of communication and cooperation.

More importantly, new research shows that bees also have another very important thing in common with humans, which is the ability to do maths.

Based on this surprising discovery, scientists believe that mathematics could be the basis of a universal language.

One of the big problems for communicating with aliens is the enormous distances involved.

Given that the nearest star to the sun is 4.4 light-years away, it would take an absolute minimum of 10 years to send a message and get a reply.

This makes it impractical to try to learn an alien’s language from scratch, like in the sci-fi movie Arrival.

Instead, scientists want to develop a universal language that can be understood by any species, regardless of how they communicate.

To find a solution to this puzzle, the researchers asked how we might communicate with one of the most alien-like species on Earth.

Co-author Dr Adrian Dyer, of Monash University, told the Daily Mail: ‘Because bees and humans are separated by about 600 million years in evolutionary time, we developed very different physiology, brain size, culture.’

However, despite these enormous differences, both humans and bees seem to have a similar basic understanding of mathematics.

In previous studies, Dr Dyer and his co-authors found that bees have the ability to learn mathematical concepts.

The researchers set up experiments in which bees could participate in maths tests to receive a reward of sugar water.

During these trials, bees showed the ability to add and subtract, categorise quantities as odd or even, and even demonstrated an understanding of ‘zero’.

Incredibly, bees even demonstrated an ability to link abstract symbols with numbers, in a very simple version of how humans learn the Arabic numerals.

The fact that such a different organism shares mathematical concepts with humans lends evidence to the theory that mathematics could be a universal language.

The idea that mathematics could be the basis of alien communication is not a new theory.

In fact, the covers of the Golden Records, which accompanied the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes launched into deep space in 1977, were carved with mathematical and physical quantities.

Likewise, when researchers broadcast the Arecibo radio message into space in 1974, it contained 1,679 zeros and ones, ordered to communicate the numbers 1 to ten and the atomic numbers of the elements that make up DNA.

However, scientists weren’t sure whether aliens would have similar enough mathematical concepts to understand these messages.

In their new paper, the researchers argue that their evidence from bees suggests that maths really is universal.

Dr Dyer says: ‘When we tested bees on mathematical type problems, and they could build an understanding to solve the questions we posed, it was very interesting, and convincing that an alien species could share similar capabilities.’

‘Now we know maths can be solved by bees, we have a solid basis to think about how to try to communicate with alien intelligence.’

As to what that language might look like, Dr Dyer says it may be very similar to the mathematics most of us use every day.

‘Mathematics, which was first developed by philosophers to communicate complex problems more efficiently, is already a language we humans use every day.

‘At a simple level, binary coded information would be a start, then, like we humans learn language through many “baby steps”, we learn with another species to build a commonly understood language framework.’