Honeybees could help humans communicate with aliens, researchers say

Researchers suggest that studying how honeybees process information could help humans communicate with extraterrestrial life.

Although honeybees and humans diverged evolutionarily more than 600 million years ago, both species share common traits such as social behavior, communication skills, and mathematical abilities.

Studies show that despite their small brains, bees can solve basic addition and subtraction problems and even categorize numbers as odd or even. They may also understand the concept of zero.

Based on these findings, scientists are exploring whether mathematics could serve as a universal language for communication with aliens. If bees can understand mathematical concepts, it implies that these ideas do not rely on human language.

This finding is significant because bees are evolutionarily distant from humans, far more so than mammals like macaques or dolphins.

In an article for The Conversation, researchers argue that if two “alien” species like humans and honeybees can both perform mathematics, then math could form the basis of a universal language.

The thought experiment, published in the journal Leonardo, relies on the philosophical idea that mathematics is an objective structure that exists independently of human beings. Researchers argue that even if aliens possess drastically different sensory perceptions, mathematical structures could provide a common ground for understanding.

This concept is not entirely new. Previous scientific endeavors to communicate with extraterrestrial life have also relied on mathematics. For example, the Golden Records sent on the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes in 1977 contained mathematical quantities to explain our world to extraterrestrials.

The researchers now plan to investigate whether different species develop different approaches to mathematics, similar to dialects in language.