Humankind has long been captivated by the mystery of space and the possibility of life beyond Earth. We continually ask whether we are alone in the universe, what intelligent extraterrestrial life might be like, and how communication with such beings could even be possible.

Scientific evidence suggests that extraterrestrial life may exist, yet the immense distances between stars present a major challenge. Our nearest stellar neighbour lies about 4.4 light years away, meaning that any exchange of messages would take many years, even under ideal conditions. If contact were ever made, it would almost certainly rely on long-distance communication without the benefit of a shared language.

One possible solution lies in mathematics. To explore this idea, we can look closer to home – at honeybees. Despite having brains vastly different from ours, bees can engage in basic mathematical tasks. In a recent paper published in Leonardo, we argue that this shared capacity supports the idea of mathematics as a potential “universal language” for interstellar communication.

The notion of mathematics as universal has deep roots. Galileo famously described the universe as being written in the language of mathematics, and science fiction has often echoed this idea. In “Contact”, aliens communicate using prime numbers, while real-world efforts such as the Voyager Golden Records and the Arecibo message used mathematical patterns to convey information about humanity. In 2022, researchers developed a binary language designed to introduce extraterrestrials to human mathematics, chemistry, and biology.

Bees provide a compelling model for this concept. Though humans and bees diverged evolutionarily more than 600 million years ago, both species have developed complex social systems and communication methods. Bees use the waggle dance to convey precise information about food sources, while humans rely on spoken and written language.

Between 2016 and 2024, experiments showed that bees could perform simple addition and subtraction, recognize odd and even quantities, understand zero, and associate symbols with numbers. These findings demonstrate that even miniature brains can grasp numerical concepts.

If such mathematically “alien” species on Earth share this ability with humans, it is plausible that intelligent extraterrestrials might as well. This raises a profound question: is mathematics a human invention, or a universal consequence of intelligence itself?

For more details, read the full article by The Conversation.