We haven't been able to decode what whales and dolphins are communicating. Are they using language? A problem SETI faces is whether we would be able to decode an alien signal. They may be too different in their biology, culture and technology. The book & movie Contact propose that math is a universal language. This assumes they're motivated to use the same basic mathematical structures we do. Maybe they don't care about prime numbers.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem explores an alien ocean that so different humans utterly fail to communicate with it, leading to the ocean creating humans from memories in brain scans broadcast over the ocean, but it's never understood why the ocean did this. The recreated humans don't know either.

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adamzwasserman 3 days ago | parent [-]

The whole "math is a universal" language is particularly laughable to me considering it is a formal system and the universe is observably irregular.

As I am wont to say: regularity is only ever achieved at the price of generality.

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zeroonetwothree 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Many mathematical structures are 'irregular'. That's not a very strong argument against math as a universal descriptor.

	▲	adamzwasserman 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		see reply above

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andoando 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Think about what math is trying to formalize

	▲	adamzwasserman 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Math formalizes regularities by abstracting away irregularities - that's precisely my point. Any formal system achieves its regularity by limiting its scope. Math can describe aspects of reality with precision, but it cannot capture reality's full complexity. A 'universal language' that can only express what fits into formal systems isn't universal at all: it's a specialized tool that works within constrained domains.