Listening for Extraterrestrial Blah Blah - Issue 43: Heroes

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. 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. Through the study of animal communication, my colleagues and I have developed a new kind of detector, a "communication intelligence" filter, to determine whether a signal from space is from a technologically advanced civilization or not.