Bees did MATHS, and solved an alien communication problem
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Bees did MATHS, and solved an alien communication problem")
Bees reveal the best way to talk to aliens is mathematics. Photograph: (Unsplash)
Humans have yet to find aliens. But they are already preparing for the day this happens, and have been working on languages that they both can use to communicate. Scientists had a lightbulb moment when they observed bees doing maths. Here is what happened.
Scientists looking to understand how to communicate with aliens say that honeybees are the key to achieving the right methods to do so. Bees might be tiny insects that forage through flowers for nectar. But they are known to possess incredible brains and can even solve simple mathematical problems, as demonstrated by an eight-year study. They were found to be able to add, subtract and also knew the difference between odd and even numbers. This led scientists to wonder if communication with aliens could be based on mathematics. "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 a piece in The Conversation.
This theory is part of a thought experiment published in the journal Leonardo. "The ancestors of bees and humans diverged over 600 million years ago, yet we both possess communication, sociality, and some mathematical ability," the writers wrote. It is based on the philosophical idea that mathematics is not limited to merely being a way to solve the mysteries of the universe. “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.
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Bees attended maths sessions in the tests
Between 2016 and 2024, scientists explored the ability of bees to learn mathematics. They freely attended the outdoor maths tests to receive sugar water. During this study, scientists noticed that the bees showed evidence of being able to carry out simple addition and subtraction, distinguish between odd and even, and order quantities of items, including an understanding of “zero”. They could even link symbols with numbers.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 also carry mathematical etchings
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This isn't the first time such a suggestion has been made. Previous efforts to communicate with extraterrestrial beings also used mathematics and numbers. Something similar can be found on the Golden Records aboard Voyager 1 and 2. The probes that are now floating in space, far away from the solar system, have mathematical quantities etched on the Records. This was done with the view that aliens might understand them and humans would be able to “communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials”. Similarly, the 1974 Arecibo radio message beamed out into space consisted of 1,679 zeros and ones. Its intention was to tell any aliens out there about the numbers one to ten and the atomic numbers of the elements that make up DNA.
