If one is looking for signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, why not practice on some of the non-human communication systems already known on our own planet? Whales have had a global communication system for millions of years—longer than Homo sapiens has even existed. Bees, which communicate in part by dancing, had democratic debates about the best places to swarm millions of years before humans came up with democracy as a political system. And other examples abound. No person I know of who has studied another animal’s communication system has ever concluded that the species was dumber than they’d previously thought. [...]
Put simply, we may well have received a message from intelligent beings and neglected it because it didn’t conform to our expectations for what a signal should look like. And this might be why we have yet to detect any interstellar communications in 50 years of searching. [...]
Most linguists used to suppose that Zipf’s Law was a characteristic of human languages only. So we were quite excited to find that, upon plotting the frequency of occurrence of adult bottlenose-dolphin whistles, that they, too, obeyed Zipf’s Law! Later, when two baby bottlenose dolphins were born at Marine World in California, we recorded their infant whistles and discovered that they had the same Zipf’s Law slope as baby human babbling. Thus baby dolphins babble their whistles and have to learn their communication system in a way not dissimilar from the way baby humans learn their languages. By the time the dolphins reached the age of 12 months, the frequency of occurrence distribution of their whistles had reached a –1 slope, as well. [...]
To transmit knowledge, even a very advanced extraterrestrial civilization would still have to obey the rules of information theory. While perhaps not being able to decipher such a message because of lack of common symbols (the same problem we have with, for example, humpback whales), we would get an indication of how complex their communication system—and thereby their thought processes—may be. If the conditional probabilities of a SETI signal are, for example, 20th-order, then not only is the signal artificial in origin, but it would reflect a language far more complex than any on Earth. We would have a quantitative measure of the complexity of the thought processes of a transmitting ETI species.
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