It is instructive that as our species has discovered new wavelengths or bandwidths of transmission and reception in nature, we have not found anything communicating on them in a recognizably representational fashion. This is much like the silence of nature in the face of language. Nature is communicating, but more directly, without the structural artifact.

But I imagine being young when radio was new. Wondering what signals might be already occurring undiscovered. Teasing the reception frequency in hopes of receiving the transmissions of… another intelligence. A sophisticated nonhuman intelligence. So far, we haven’t found one. At least, not in the places we’ve been looking.

Of course, when I stop and think about it seriously, I realize that a truly sophisticated nonhuman intelligence (like that embodied as nature) probably wouldn’t require or employ technology as we understand it. And would probably utilize something vastly more useful and interesting than language. So the idea that we might find such intelligences transmitting language on radios is naive.

But it might not be entirely off base. Language use in an animal could be evidence of direct contact with advanced nonhuman intelligence. What we think of as language could be little more than the broken and misfunctioning remnant of a once-robust intelligence transport that went haywire in us when the intelligence organizing it disappeared from our experience.

Did they disappear because our minds were remade in the image of the transport, of language? Did the voices of the sky-beings, like our own imaginations in late childhood, fade in response to the advancing amputations of abstraction?

Is what we have left effectively something like the baby-talk of some form of advanced nonhuman intelligence?